Families
matter:
Designing media for a digital age
Lori M. Takeuchi
June 2011
1900 Broadway
New York, NY 10023
p: (212) 595-3456
[email protected]
www.joanganzcooneycenter.org
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop
© The Joan Ganz Cooney Center 2011. All rights reserved.
The mission of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is to foster innovation in children’s learning through
digital media. The Cooney Center catalyzes and supports research, development, and investment
in digital media technologies to advance children’s learning, and is committed to the timely
dissemination of useful research. Working closely with its Fellows, national advisors, media
scholars, and practitioners, the Center publishes industry, policy, and research briefs examining
key issues in the field of digital media and learning.
A full-text PDF of this report is available for free download from www.joanganzcooneycenter.org.
Individual print copies of this publication are available for $20 via check, money order, or purchase
order made payable to “The Joan Ganz Cooney Center for Educational Media and Research” and
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Sesame Workshop
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[email protected]
Suggested citation: Takeuchi, L. M. (2011). Families matter: Designing media for a digital age. New York:
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.
contents
2
preface
4
executive summary
10
introduction
12
background and methods
14
15
17
Literature on media use and parenting
Conceptual framework: Ecological perspectives on development and learning
Methods
18
parenting in a digital age: results from a national survey
19
19
21
23
25
Access to media in the home
Intergenerational play and learning
Parent concerns and perceptions about digital media
Rules and restrictions
Summary of survey findings
26
the case studies
26
32
Gabriela Guzman
Sierra Ramirez
40
synthesis: new media and the modern family
41
41
42
43
43
44
Forget Facebook—the power of real social networks
Go outside and play with your friends
Platform perceptions
What is developmentally appropriate?
Parent media preferences
No two families alike
46
recommendations
47
49
Research recommendations
Industry recommendations
52
conclusion
54
references
57
appendix
57
Appendix A: The American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on media
education: Recommendations to pediatricians
Appendix B: Study methods
Appendix C: Relevant articles and reports
58
59
1
preface
The 1960s was a period of focused attention on poverty in
America: Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s sociological analysis
of the devastating influence of a “culture of poverty” on
children’s life chances was followed by national attempts
to help children attain educational achievements that could
lift them out of poverty. In 1965, Head Start was created,
and in 1968, Head Start began funding a television program
that would eventually be called Sesame Street, operated by
the Carnegie Corporation Preschool Television Project.
Both Head Start and Sesame Street were conceived as a
type of inoculation against educational deprivation. Both
also recognized the importance of an engaged and committed
family in helping vulnerable children out of poverty. Head Start
provided opportunities for parents and their children, and
Sesame Street was programmed in ways that encouraged
parents to watch along with their kids.
2
Over four decades later, some modest progress has been made in closing the academic
achievement gap that Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and
special projects like Sesame Street set out to address. Unfortunately, for approximately
one-third of our nation’s children, learning and developmental pathways — starting
in the earliest stages of life — are still compromised by a lack of educational and
economic opportunity. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on educational
intervention and other anti-poverty measures, and the results have not reversed a
tide of disappointing and tragic results for millions of children. We need to look to
additional ways to help these children and their families.
We believe that new forms of digital media are well positioned to play a constructive
role in advancing powerful solutions to national educational challenges. Most families
have altered their patterns of media consumption dramatically in recent years. With
the advent of new technologies for the home and workplace, great changes in
productivity and leisure time activity have occurred. Many observers have pointed
to the digital media explosion as a major barrier to connected family time, and
several national studies, including a series carried out over a decade by the Kaiser
Family Foundation, have pointed to strong public health concerns about children
and youth’s media exposure levels. But we remain cautiously optimistic that some of
the unique advantages of digital media — the strong engagement factor, personalized
assessments, the boon to bridging learning across settings, and the 21st century
skills they promote — may be parlayed for social progress.
To better understand the difficult landscape that families face in preparing their
children to thrive in a dramatically changed learning ecology, the Center undertook the
current study. Families Matter: Designing Media for a Digital Age combines both in-depth
case examples of children and family interactions, as well as a national survey focused
on why and how parents are shaping their children’s current media consumption
habits. The findings show that most families are cautiously sorting out which digital
media products are appropriate for their child and his or her unique needs. They
also point out that parents of young children are concerned about the quality of
the offerings available today, especially for kids in the middle childhood period (ages
preschool through elementary) where the marketplace of games, mobile applications,
and television products has not yet satisfied the need for educational value.
Finally, the current study reasserts the primacy of family as a great socializing and
support system. When media producers, educators, and policymakers align interests
with parents, there is no doubt that our nation can dramatically improve its educational
performance. As media producers and researchers, we intend to do our part: moving
forward, we will integrate the best media tools available with both products and
educational models to help families gain a new head start. They deserve nothing less.
Michael Levine, PhD
Executive Director
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop
Ellen Wartella, PhD
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor of Communication
Professor of Psychology and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy
Northwestern University
3
executive summary
This report focuses on two complementary studies that
document how families with young children are integrating
digital media into the rhythm of daily life. Results from a
survey of more than 800 parents of children ages 3 through
10 reveal how parents nationwide feel about raising children
in a digital age. In-depth case studies provide further insight
into these statistics, probing how parent attitudes toward
technology, along with family values, routines, and structures,
are shaping young children’s experiences using digital media.
This research assumes an ecological view of development
and learning, which considers the many different spheres of
influence — from parents to peers to the social and economic
context — that a child now must navigate while growing up.
4
Executive Summary
Key findings
Forces outside of the home shape children’s
experiences with digital media
percent believe that mediated activities infringe
on time that would otherwise be spent in
face-to-face interactions.
Institutional factors determine parental work
schedules and childcare arrangements, which in
turn affect how much time parents can spend on
media-based activities with their kids. Cultural
factors prioritize certain activities (e.g., socializing
with friends and family) over others (e.g., playing
video games alone). And parents’ personal histories
— what they played as young children, how they
learned to operate new technologies for the first
time, and their own experiences raising older
siblings, for instance — inevitably shape their
childrearing practices around media.
... Yet most parents don’t believe their own
kids are at risk
Parents prefer participating in activities with
their kids that involve older media
Nearly two-thirds of parents restrict their kids’
media use on a case-by-case basis
Two-thirds of young children play on TV-based
video game consoles, but only half (52%) of their
parents are playing along with them. The media
activities parents reported doing most with their
children — watching TV (89%), reading books
(79%), and playing board games (73%) — aligned
with reports of what they enjoy doing most with
them. In other words, parents aren’t participating
in media activities that they themselves don’t
take pleasure in.
The multiplicity of new platforms and the rate
at which they change may explain why so many
parents don’t impose a firm set of rules — they
find it either unnecessary or simply impossible.
Meanwhile 22% percent say they do have strict
rules around what their kids can do with homebased media, and 8% say they have rules but
don’t always strongly enforce them. Only 7%
of parents claim to have no rules.
Not all digital media are created equal in
parents’ eyes
Research recommendations
Parents rated computer-based activities as
most valuable for young children’s learning, but
a surprising majority also thinks video games
develop skills important to school success. Mobile
phones are viewed as least valuable for learning,
and the device most prohibited by parents for
young children’s use; handheld gaming consoles
and MP3 players are much more accepted. These
perceptions are based on parents’ still evolving
understanding of what their kids should be doing
with digital media at certain ages.
Map children’s development to new platforms
Parents worry about digital media interfering
with the healthy development of young children
Millions of dollars and countless hours have been
invested in studying the potential of video games in
fostering learning. This large body of research may,
in part, explain why 69% of the parents we surveyed
believe certain games can develop academic skills.
Techno-enthusiasts today are claiming that mobile
Fifty-nine percent of parents believe that digital
media prevent children from getting physical
exercise, while 53% are concerned about their
children’s online safety and privacy. And 40%
Only 18% of parents indicated that their own
children spend too much time with technology.
Why the apparent paradox? Parents may be
unaware of just how much media their kids are
consuming. Laptops, MP3 players, and handheld
gaming devices tend to be used in the outer
reaches of the home, and less typically positioned
the way TV sets are, in a family or living room
where parents can see when and what their children
are watching, and for how long.
Children today have access to a wide array of media
platforms, many originally designed for adult use.
Just as researchers did for television, the formal
and content features of these newer platforms
need to be mapped to children’s developing
cognitive, social, and now even motor and visual
capacities, given the availability of gesture-based
and 3D gaming systems.
Conduct research on the learning potential of
new platforms
5
devices hold as much potential to transform
learning, but we have yet to amass the research
base necessary to alter parents’ perceptions about
mobile devices and other emerging platforms.
Investigate the new coviewing
In the 1970s, researchers discovered that children
whose parents talk about Sesame Street as they
watch learn more from the show. Now, with over
two-thirds of mothers in the workforce and more
platforms delivering media into homes than ever
before, children more often engage with media by
themselves, at earlier ages, and for longer periods
of time. Today, researchers must turn their attention
to mobile devices, virtual worlds, e-books, and other
new platforms for media coparticipation, and the
ways in which grandparents, older siblings, and
other family members can also support young
children’s learning.
Industry recommendations
Design with the full ecology of the child in mind
Most producers of children’s media are tuned into
the interactions between player and platform, but
few pay sufficient attention to the institutional
(family, school), economic, and cultural factors
that invariably shape these interactions.
Create video games that appeal to kids and
parents alike
Producers need to work on creating experiences
that appeal to both parents and children, just as
the producers of Sesame Street intentionally write
adult humor into the show to encourage them to
watch with their preschoolers.
Foster family teamwork
Digital media are often blamed for displacing
the time kids spend in face-to-face conversation
— so producers should design experiences that
require flesh-and-blood partners to play.
Think outside the (X)Box
Producers should use technology to engage
children in the very activities — socializing,
outdoor exercise, academic pursuits, and
imaginative play — that adults fear digital
media are displacing from children’s lives.
6
Anytime, anywhere learning
Mobile devices can enhance networked play and
learning by allowing kids to take the necessary
hardware outside, and from home to school to
grandma’s house for uninterrupted continuity
of experience.
Design the guilt out of digital-age parenting
Producers should imagine and build devices
that let parents interactively participate in media
activities with their children, whether one room
or one thousand miles apart.
Claudia Guzman picks her husband up from work most
evenings, daughter Gabriela (age 8) and granddaughter Dora
(age 7) in tow. The 15-mile drive between Highland Park and
Monrovia can take up to 60 minutes at the peak of the LA
rush hour. While little Dora naps in the back seat, beside her,
Gabriela staves off boredom by texting her cousin Michelle.
Michelle lives in Atlanta and is 17 — a senior in high school
— but the two communicate frequently now. “I like the way
me and Michelle still talk and stuff,” Gabriela told us two
months after getting her own cell phone. “We text each
other about almost every day.”
Gabriela’s lavender Motorola RAZR is a hand-me-down from
her mom, but to Gabriela it’s as good as new. Her father Hector,
a wireless communications technician, gave her the phone to
help her mom coordinate family errands and so he could keep
in touch with Gabriela when he’s away at work. “Whenever I
would stay after school,” she explained, “my dad would text me
saying, ‘Hi, are you okay? I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
I’ll see you later.’ Or something like that.” Gabriela reported
enjoying these brief interludes, and took pride in being trained
to use the phone by the very best: “My dad, he’s been working
for a [phone] company like almost all his life. And like he taught
me how to text, and like if it’s a 213 number and you’re calling
a 323 number, then you have to put 1, 3-2-3.”
8
Neither Claudia nor Hector had anticipated that the phone
would give their daughter such direct access to an otherwise
missing older sister figure. And they’re not alone in feeling that
cell phones have brought extended family closer. According
to a 2008 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey,
most adults believe that communication technologies today
are bringing family members close (60%) or closer (25%) than
they did when they were kids (Kennedy, Smith, Wells, &
Wellman, 2008). But when we checked in with Claudia seven
months after Gabriela started using the old RAZR, she shared
an unanticipated outcome of her daughter’s cell phone use.
Gabriela grew so prolific on the keypad that she ran up a $250
bill on text messages alone. This compelled Hector to enforce
a “no more useless texting” rule. Gabriela has since decided
to stop texting all together…at least for the time being.
Will this new rule affect Gabriela’s deepening relationship
with Michelle? What about texting with her father, which has
allowed them to converse beyond the two short hours they
ordinarily share in person on schooldays? How long will
Hector’s rule last before he signs up for a texting plan, or
before Gabriela learns to be more judicious with her texts?
This is not the first technology to enter the Guzman home and
shake up family rhythms and routines, budgets and beliefs
— nor will it be the last. What are parents in similar situations
doing to deal with these disruptions? And how is the modern
family ecology evolving as a result?
9
introduction
New consumer technologies are entering homes at an
ever-faster rate, and fundamentally transforming how we live,
work, play, and communicate. Some of these technologies
— e.g., the Internet, video games, e-books, and cell phones —
offer new opportunities to engage parents in their children’s
learning at home. But as we enter into the second decade of
the 21st century, parents are still more likely to watch TV and
read books with their young children than play video games
or surf the Internet with them. Families are in a transition
period, one in which parents recognize the importance of
technology in their children’s learning and future success but,
for many good reasons, don’t always grant them access to the
newer forms of media transforming their own adult lives.
10
This paper reports on two complementary studies
designed to document how families with young
children are integrating digital media into the
rhythm of daily life. Results from a survey of more
than 800 parents of kids ages 3 through 10 reveal
current trends in the types of media young children
are using at home, and indicate how parents
nationwide feel about raising children in a digital
age. In-depth case studies provide further insight
into these statistics, probing how daily routines,
day care arrangements, and even birth order are
shaping young children’s experiences using digital
media, and how, in turn, parents are reconciling
their own histories and values with media entering
the home. Together, these studies aim to describe
the modern family media ecology by asking:
r How are digital media influencing family
routines and play and learning patterns?
r What do parents think about the role of digital
media in young children’s development?
r How are parent attitudes toward technology,
along with family values, routines, and structures, shaping young children’s experiences
using digital media?
r How are parents and children using these
media together and apart?
The report is organized as follows: First, we
describe the goals and purpose of this research,
acknowledging the recent headlines and
scholarship that have inspired our inquiries and
informed our methodological approaches. Next,
we share the results from the parent survey,
followed by the case studies of two families
we interviewed and observed over a period
of a few months. We then analyze the survey
results and case studies in tandem, and from
this synthesis offer researchers and media
producers guidance for improving family
engagement with digital media.
How to use this report
Families Matter was written for professionals
interested in fostering family engagement and
learning with digital media. While we suggest
reading the report in its entirety, each section is
useful in its own right:
Background and methods (page 12): A brief
review of literature on parenting around media,
and a description of our ecological approach
to understanding learning and development.
Parenting in a digital age: Results from a
national survey (page 18): Findings from a
web-administered market research survey of
810 parents on what their young children are
doing with media, and parent attitudes toward
these activities.
The case studies (page 26): In-depth narratives
of two girls — Gabriela (age 8) and Sierra (age 7)
— and their family media ecologies.
Synthesis: New media and the modern family
(page 40): Analysis of intersections between
the case studies and survey study findings.
Recommendations (page 46): Translation of
both studies’ findings into actionable steps for
fostering family engagement with digital media.
11
background and methods
Children today are surrounded by digital media. Households
with kids ages 4 to 14 own, on average, 11 consumer electronic
devices (NPD Group, 2009), which means they’re spending a
good chunk of their waking hours texting friends from mobile
phones, playing video games, grooving to their iPods, and
hanging out on websites like Facebook and Webkinz. In fact,
a line of research sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation
(KFF) found that youth between the ages of 8 and 18 were
spending an hour more with media in 2009 — 7 hours and 38
minutes — than they were in 2004 (6.5 hours). And kids’
digital media use isn’t replacing the time they spend with
older media like television and music. Instead, they’re media
multitasking, or squeezing an extra hour of media use into
the 7.5 non-school hours they have each day, for a total
of 10 hours and 45 minutes of media exposure. (Rideout,
Foehr, & Roberts 2010).
12
The KFF study and other large-scale surveys (e.g.,
Gutnick, Robb, Takeuchi, & Kotler, 2011; Nielson
Company, 2009; Rideout, Hamel, & Kaiser Family
Foundation, 2006) provide valuable snapshots of the
amount of time children are spending with what
types of tools and media. But recent ethnographic
work has begun to paint a more complex picture
of the digital lives of American youth. The
multi-institution Digital Youth Project, the most
extensive ethnographic study of youth media use
in the US to date, sought an economically diverse
set of 12- to 18-year-olds’ perspectives on what
they’re playing, communicating, and creating with
new media to understand how these practices
are embedded in the broader social and cultural
ecology. What they discovered is that youth are
using online media to extend real-world relationships, explore interests, express identities, and
expand their independence, all while practicing
new technical and social skills (Ito et al., 2009).
Less attention has been paid to how younger
children are learning and developing with digital
media (Gutnick et al., 2011). As electronic gadgets
become ever more affordable, parents are
increasingly inclined to purchase them for their
young children. In fact, the average age at which
children begin to use these devices fell from age
8.1 in 2005 to 6.7 in 2007 (NPD Group, 2007). More
recent anecdotal evidence reported by journalists
suggests this figure now hovers closer to age 3 or 4.
The major thrust of this trend in reporting calls to
question, “How young is too young?”1 Leading news
organizations such as the New York Times are raising
and reflecting concerns from both parents and
experts that new technologies are robbing
preadolescents of their childhoods2, compelling
them to stay indoors, and depriving them of
opportunities to exercise their imaginations.
Other stories focus on the cognitive3 and social4
consequences of raising young children on too
heavy a media diet. As one New York Times journalist
noted, “The average 3-year-old can pick up an iPhone
and expertly scroll through the menu of apps, but
how many 7-year-olds can organize a kickball game
with the neighborhood kids?” (Stout, 2011)
Parents today worry about the displacement effects
of screen media over physical exercise, academic
activities (e.g., homework), imaginative play, and
face-to-face interactions. Their fears are well
grounded. To determine whether TV supplants kids’
participation in more developmentally appropriate
activities, researchers examined the time-use
diaries of 1,050 young children collected in 1997
(Vandewater, Bickham, & Lee, 2006). They found
that the more TV kids watch, the less time they
spend with siblings and other family members,
or engaging in creative play, especially among
children younger than age 5. But the study failed
to detect a relationship between TV viewing and
time spent on either active play or book reading.
It’s worth noting, however, that these data were
collected more than a decade ago, when children
had access to fewer platforms and weren’t
consuming as much media as they are today.
There is good reason to suspect that Internet,
mobile device, and video game play are now
threatening kids’ active playtime, too.
These concerns are hardly new. We’ve been
worried about media interfering with the healthy
development of our children ever since the moving
image hit cinemas a century ago (Wartella &
Jennings, 2000). What’s different today is that
newer forms of media — which by design provide
interactive experiences for the child — have been
shown to motivate, facilitate, and deepen learning
in ways that film, radio, and television never quite
managed (e.g., Bavelier, Green, & Dye, 2010; Jenkins,
Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2006;
Lieberman, 2006). Furthermore, the recent entry
of gesture-based gaming systems like the Wii,
Kinect, and PlayStation Move are getting kids
off the couch and burning calories while they
play (Thai, Lowenstein, Ching, & Rejeski, 2009).
For these reasons, our research seeks to better
understand parents’ concerns about digital-based
play, which to many adults bears no resemblance
to the play they experienced growing up. In this
report, we will dig into understanding the roots
of these concerns, and see how parents are
responding. We will attempt to identify the
ways parents are playing and learning with their
kids on these novel platforms, and gauge how
enjoyable and edifying both parties are finding
the experience. These insights can lead to valuable
recommendations and models for productive
family interactions with digital media.
www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/02/kids.social.networks/index.html
See www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/garden/06play.html
3
See www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048363,00.html or www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
4
See www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?ref=mattrichtel
1
2
13
Literature on media use and parenting
Because television is the platform that has
received the most attention from researchers
interested in family engagement with media, we
start with this body of literature as a basis for our
inquiries about digital technologies in households
with young children.
“Too much TV” has been empirically associated with
a host of childhood afflictions, including delayed
language development in babies, aggressive
behavior, and poor academic performance (see
American Academy of Pediatrics, 2010 for review).
TV commercials are often blamed for the childhood
obesity epidemic in the US. Ads for sugary cereals,
soda, and fast food have been shown to prompt
eating (e.g., Taveras et al., 2006) and increase
preschoolers’ choice of the advertised item (e.g.,
Jeffrey, McLellam, & Fox, 1982). To protect children
from these threats to their healthy development,
in 2001 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)
set guidelines recommending that parents limit
children’s total screen time to two hours of “quality
programming” per day, and discourage TV viewing
for children younger than age 2 (American Academy
of Pediatrics, 2001). Over the past decade, the AAP’s
guidelines have gained the awareness of a majority
of parents (Jordan, Hersey, McDivitt, & Heitzler, 2006).
Today, the Internet, video games, and mobile devices
are gaining popularity as daily entertainment
sources for kids. And kids aren’t watching less
TV to make time for these newer media; they’re
now streaming TV content on their computers
and phones during the previously underutilized
in-between times of their daily routines. In
response to the staggering increases seen in
children’s media use between 2004 and 2009 as
reported in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation
(i.e., Rideout et al., 2010), the AAP issued an
addendum to its 2001 recommendations. This
addendum informed pediatricians — and by
extension, parents — of the risks that have been
empirically associated with the overconsumption
of TV and newer forms of media (e.g., sexting,
pornography, pro-anorexia websites), and advised
constituents on how to protect young people
from these risks (American Academy of Pediatrics,
2010). The 2010 policy statement did not alter the
14
screen time limits recommended in 2001, but it
did underscore the need to include video game
and Internet use in the above-mentioned two
hours (see Appendix A).
The AAP guidelines have been shown to be effective
in limiting media consumption in at least some
families. Carlson and colleagues (2010) analyzed
the survey responses of 7,415 youth aged 9 to 15
years to discover that in households where both
parents and children reported having set rules
around screen time, children were less likely to
spend more than two hours per day watching TV
and playing videos games. They also found children
from African-American and lower-income families
to be more likely to exceed the AAP’s recommended
limits, and their parents to be less aware of these
limits. Carlson et al.’s findings suggest that raising
parental awareness of the AAP guidelines may
be effective in decreasing screen time among
9- to 15-year-olds.
But rule setting isn’t the only way parents
influence their children’s TV viewing. Valkenburg,
Krcmar, Peeters, and Marseille (1999) identify
three categories of parental mediation: instructive
mediation involves parents’ efforts to explain
television content in terms that their child can
understand; social coviewing refers to occasions
when parents watch TV with their kids; and
restrictive mediation refers to setting time or
content limits on kids’ viewing, or using TV
to reward or punish.
Digital media elicit similar styles of parental
mediation, but their interactive qualities offer
opportunities for parents to engage more deeply in
play and learning with their children. Barron, Martin,
Takeuchi, and Fithian (2009) used ethnographic
methods to understand how the parents of a set
of technologically fluent adolescents helped foster
the interests and skills of their children, and
identified seven distinct roles in the process:
teacher, collaborator, learning broker, resource
provider, nontechnical consultant, employer, and
learner. For the present study, we crafted several
survey questions upon Barron et al.’s taxonomy
to determine how parents are supporting younger
children’s development around digital media.
Plowman, McPake, and Stephens (2008) studied
3- to 5-year-old’s technology learning at home, and
how other family members such as grandparents
and siblings are contributing to this learning. In
their survey of 346 families and deeper case studies
of 24, the authors discovered that the adults often
believed their children were “just picking it up”
when it came to demonstrating new technical skills.
What the adults hadn’t realized is that they were
unwittingly modeling technical practices in front of
their preschoolers (e.g., logging on to the computer,
using the remote control). As part of the Digital
Youth Project, Horst (2009) used ethnographic
methods to examine parental structuring and
regulation of spatial arrangements, routines, and
family identity around children’s media use. For
example, in some homes, parents placed computers
in kitchens, hallways, and other common spaces
where they could easily monitor what their kids
were doing. In others, where tighter living quarters
forced parents and children to spend more time
watching TV shows together, parents yielded
more indirect influences over their children’s
media consumption.
Taken together, our parent survey and case studies
build upon the studies mentioned above in what
they have to say about digital media use in families
with elementary school-age children. Unlike
teenagers, who use new media to extend their
social networks and establish independence from
their families (Ito et al., 2009), preadolescent-age
children still seek connection to parents and other
family members (Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, 2005). This is why middle childhood is
such a critical period of development to study: there
is still hope of drawing children and their parents
or other caring adults together in meaningful
play and learning!
Conceptual framework: Ecological
perspectives on development and learning
This research assumes an ecological view of the
developing child, which considers the microsystems
— the immediate settings in which the child
interacts with people and digital media — and the
larger social contexts in which these settings
are situated (see Figure 1 on p.16). According to
Bronfenbrenner (1977), who proposed this broader
approach to studying human development,
“environmental structures, and the processes
taking place within and between them, must be
viewed as interdependent and must be analyzed
in systems terms” (p. 518). As such, what a child
does in school inevitably shapes what she does
at home, and vice versa. Moreover, her cultural
heritage and what her parents do for a living bear
strongly on her activities at home, in school, and
in her community. A macrosystem analysis of
the opening vignette, to use Bronfenbrenner’s
terminology, would consider the ways in which
the Guzmans’ status as working-class, secondgeneration Mexican Americans shapes their
restrictions around their daughter’s cell phone use.
Barron (2004; Barron et al., 2009) further articulates
Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological perspective with
particular respect to the development of children’s
interest in technology. She employs a learning
ecologies framework to track how adolescents
develop technological interest and expertise across
time and space, and the social and material
supports that enable this development. Digital
Youth Project researchers Horst, Herr-Stephenson,
and Robinson (2009) conceptualize a young person’s
media ecology as “the varied social, technical,
and cultural contexts that structure youth media
engagement” (p. 2) and that are meaningful to them.
Unlike the media ecologies of past generations —
which may have comprised television, radio, and
less interactive technologies — today’s support the
development of technical and other 21st-century
skills in the context of socializing, communicating,
and playing.
With its focus on preadolescent-age children, the
present research contributes to these perspectives
by examining how the technological resources in
a child’s learning ecology may support or inhibit
his or her early social, cognitive, and physical
development. In theory, the introduction of
communication and production tools into the
ecology of a young child proffers contact with
more capable peers (e.g., Gabriela’s 17-year-old
cousin) and activities that two decades ago might
have been considered beyond the capabilities of an
8-year-old (e.g., movie making, digital photography).
The Internet has made it possible for kids around
15
the world to interact, exposing them to new cultures
and perspectives. For these reasons, the promise
digital media holds for learning is exciting.
In reality, though, not all youth are using these tools
to catalyze their cognitive, social, or emotional
development. Exposure to people and experiences
beyond a child’s local community or age is what
many parents want to guard their children from.
Some argue that these richer, expanded learning
ecologies are too much, too soon (see Stout, 2011).
Young children in particular also require significant
scaffolding to guide and inspire their positive,
safe, and age-appropriate uses of technology;
however, such supports are a highly unequal
resource (Neuman & Celano, 2006; Warschauer
& Matuchniak, 2010).
The final section of this report will examine
study findings in light of these ecological
considerations and pay particular attention
to what is “developmentally appropriate.”
Figure 1: An ecological perspective of human development
Macrosystem
Attitudes and ideologies
of the culture
Exosystem
Parents’ work
The
neighborhood
Local school
system
Mesosystem
Government
agencies
Mass
media
Home,
parents,
siblings
Microsystem
Church,
library, after
school spaces
Macrosystem: The overarching institutional patterns of the
culture, such as its economic, social, educational, legal,
and political systems (cultural influences)
Exosystem: The larger social structures that influence what goes
on in the child’s immediate settings (institutional influences)
16
School,
teachers,
peers
Digital
media
market
Digital
media
spaces
Mesosystem: Interrelations among the major settings
that the child inhabits (distal influences)
Microsystem: Interactions between the child and her
immediate environment (proximate influences)
Bronfenbrenner (1977)
Methods
Table 1: Case children at a glance
The case studies
Between December 2008 and September 2009, we
conducted in-depth case studies of four young girls
— three 8-year-olds and one 7-year-old — all of
whom reside in the greater Los Angeles area. They
were somewhat ordinary as far as their digital
media use was concerned. None were budding
moviemakers, prodigy programmers, or avid
gamers. Their parents weren’t engineers or
professors of education, or the type to buy them
robotics kits. But all used computers, video
game consoles, and/or handheld devices on a
regular basis at home and for fun, which was
a primary selection criterion for this study.
In fact, we intentionally passed over children
who demonstrated exceptionally high levels of
technological engagement for their age because
they tend to be overrepresented in research and
journalistic accounts of “kids today,” skewing
popular conceptions of the new normalcy of
youth digital media use (Buckingham, 2008;
Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010).
We spent anywhere from two to seven days
following the case children around as they went
about their ordinary afterschool or weekend
routines — to witness what they actually did,
versus relying solely on what the children and
their parents said they did in interviews. This also
gave us a sense of the proportion of time spent
using digital media versus other activities (e.g.,
homework, outdoor playtime) and traditional
forms of media (e.g., television, music, radio; see
Appendix B for more on our case study methods).
Two of the four cases studies — Gabriela and
Sierra’s5 — are featured below. Gabriela is actually
Sierra’s aunt by way of her mother’s second
marriage (see Figure 12 on page 27), but with just
one year between them, the girls act more like
cousins. Table 1 displays demographics on the
selected families as well as information on sibling
counts and parental experience with technology.
The parent survey
The parent survey was written by researchers at the
Cooney Center in consultation with market research
firm Hotspex, and included questions regarding
5
6
Gabriela
Sierra
Child’s age
at time of study
8 years,
6 months
7 years,
2 months
Ethnicity
MexicanAmerican
MexicanAmerican
Income level
Low to middle
Middle
Siblings
3 half-brothers
(31, 28, 21)
1 older brother
(9)
Home setting
characteristics
Apartment
complex with
lots of sameage children
Grandparents
and aunt’s
family live in
adjacent house
Parents’ age
Late 40s
Late 20s /
Early 30s
Home / School
technology
access
Mid / Low
High / High
respondents’ childrearing practices around media;
their beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions about media;
interactions with their children around these
media; and demographic information. The survey
was estimated to take 20 minutes to complete.
Hotspex administered the survey through its
website in July, 2010 to 810 parents (612 mothers
and 198 fathers) of at least one preschool- or
early-elementary-aged child (ages 3 through
10) living in the US. Respondents were Hotspex
“panelists,” and invited by Hotspex to complete
this particular survey based on their demographic
profile (see Appendix B for Hotspex recruiting
methods). Because this was a web-based survey,
we can assume that all respondents had Internet
access; the sample was not representative of the
US population in this regard. The sample was
also not representative of the US population by
race/ethnicity or by state6 (see Appendix B for a
demographic breakdown of survey respondents).
All person and place names are pseudonyms to protect the case families’ privacy.
Hotspex panelists from 48 states plus the District of Columbia participated in the parent survey.
17
parenting in a digital age:
results from a national survey
Results from the 2009 Kaiser Family Foundation-sponsored
study were an abrupt wake-up call for educators, parents,
and practitioners concerned about child and adolescent health.
Rideout and colleagues (2010) found that 8-to-18-year-olds
were spending an hour more with media in 2009 — 7 hours
and 38 minutes — than they were in 2004. While notable for the
number of youth surveyed, the KFF study only canvassed
children ages 8 and older. Younger children are the focus of
Always Connected, an analysis of seven recent large-scale
studies on the media habits of kids ages 0 through 11 (Gutnick
et al., 2011). Released by Sesame Workshop in March 2011, the
report reveals developmental patterns in children’s media
use as they grow older. For instance, kids ages 2 through 5
watch more TV (including DVD and videos) than kids ages 6
through 11 do. And between the ages of 7 and 9, children shift
to more interactive pastimes: 70% of 8-year-olds play video
games, whereas less than half of 6-year-olds do. Gutnick
and colleagues found similar increases in young children’s
Internet use.
This new survey was designed to complement the important
developmental work forwarded by Always Connected by
digging deeper into the who, why, and how behind these
media consumption patterns. We asked more than 800
parents of children ages 3 through 10 not only about the
types of media their kids are using at home, but also about
their attitudes toward and rules around these media. Here
we present these parental assessments and perspectives.
Where appropriate, we reference recent or similar surveys
to bring further meaning to these findings.
18
Access to media in the home
Just because there’s a computer in a home doesn’t
mean that the children living there use it. For this
research, we were more interested in examining
the access young children have to certain forms of
media than household ownership of these media,
which other surveys typically inquire about. Parents
may own particular technologies — such as smart
phones, laptops, and even video game consoles
— but unless their children use them, they weren’t
counted in this survey.
In a majority of the families that participated
in this survey, children are playing video games.
More than half (55%) are using Nintendo DSes,
iPod touches, and/or other handheld gaming
devices, and two-thirds (68%) are playing on
TV-based video game consoles such as the
Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 (see Figure 2).
Computers are accessed even more frequently,
with 85% percent of parents reporting that their
children use them. But the oldest medium
we inquired about remains the favorite: 95%
of 3-to-10-year-olds watch TV.
Children this age are less likely to use mobile
devices, but the figures are still impressive. Forty
percent of parents reported that their children
listen to portable music devices such as iPods, and
35% have access to a regular cell phone, usually a
parent’s or other older family member’s. Internet
enabled mobile devices — also known as smart
phones — are less available to young children,
with just 14% of parents reporting that their kids
use them. Compare these figures to mobile device
use among tweens: In 2009, 80% of 11-to-14-yearolds owned iPods/MP3 players, 69% owned cell
phones, and 59% owned handheld gaming devices,
according to Rideout et al. (2010).
Intergenerational play and learning
These days, two-thirds of kids may be gaming on
a Wii, PS3, or XBox 360 at home, but only half (52%)
of parents say they’re playing along with them
(see Figure 3 on page 20). Even fewer parents play
video games with their kids on the computer
or online — just 44%. Only a third (36%) surf the
Internet together. A mere 13% reported playing
games on mobile devices with their children.
Survey respondents said they are far more likely
to watch TV (89%), read books (79%), and play
board games (73%) with their kids.
These are activities that they might have done
with their own parents when they were young
children, and also the ones they named as their
favorites. When asked which media-based activity
they enjoy doing most with their children, 41%
of parents chose watching TV, 23% chose reading
books, and 18% chose playing board games
(see Figure 4 on page 20). The remaining 18% of
respondents said that video games, computers, or
mobile devices are the most appealing platforms
for family entertainment. So, while 52% of parents
report playing TV console based video games with
their kids, only 8% would call it their favorite way
to pass time with them.
Figure 2: Which of the following items do your children ever use in your home? (Check all that apply)
100%
80%
95%
85%
60%
68%
55%
40%
55%
40%
20%
35%
14%
0%
Television
set
Computer
TV-based
Handheld
video game video game
console
device
Video
games
Portable
music
device
Cell
phone
3%
Internet
None of
enabled mobile these
device
19
When parents watch TV, read books, or play
games (board or electronic) with young children,
they’re typically in the position to guide them
through new content they may encounter during
these leisure activities. But there are other ways
that parents are playing supporting roles in their
children’s learning around media (Barron et al.,
2009; Plowman et al., 2008). A little over two-thirds
of parents reported ever teaching their kids how
to do something on the computer (see Figure 5 on
page 21), and just over half have purchased their
children digital media for educational purposes.
By contrast, just over two-thirds of parents have
purchased entertainment-related media such as
video games or gaming consoles for their kids.
These figures suggest that parents consider digital
media to be primarily for fun and secondarily
for learning.
Sometimes the roles parents play in their children’s
learning around media are less intentional, such
as when the adult assumes the position of learner.
Thirty-seven percent of parents reported that
their child has taught them how to do something
technical, like operate the DVD player or navigate
their way around a video game. When kids teach
others, the process of explaining can deepen their
own understanding of concepts, and reinforce
perceptions of themselves as capable learners
(Damon, 1984).
Figure 3: Which of these activities do you regularly do with your child? (Check all that apply)
100%
80%
89%
79%
60%
73%
52%
40%
44%
20%
36%
28%
13%
0%
Watch
television
Read
books
Play board
Play
games (non- games on
electronic) a TV based
console
Play
games
on the
computer
or Internet
Surf the
Create art Play games
Internet
or other
on a mobile
or visit
items on the device or
websites
computer
phone
of interest
2%
None of
these
Figure 4: Which of the following activities do you enjoy doing most with your child? (Select just one)
100%
80%
60%
40%
41%
20%
23%
0%
Watch
television
20
Read
books
18%
8%
Play board
Play
games (non- games on
electronic) a TV based
console
4%
Play
games
on the
computer
or Internet
2%
2%
2%
Surf the
Create art Play games
Internet
or other
on a mobile
or visit
items on the device or
websites
computer
phone
of interest
1%
None of
these
Figure 5: Which of the following have you ever done with or for your child? (Check all that apply)
100%
80%
60%
69%
68%
67%
57%
40%
37%
20%
0%
Played a video
game or other
technologybased activity
Taught our
child to do
something on
the computer
Bought
our child
entertainmentrelated media
Parent concerns and perceptions about
digital media
What parents choose to purchase for their kids,
and whether and how they monitor or regulate
their media activities are invariably tied to how
they think and feel about digital media. To get a
better sense of these perceptions and attitudes, we
asked parents to indicate which set of statements
linking digital media to healthy development (i.e.,
physical, social, emotional, cognitive) they agreed
with (see Figure 6). The most common concern
— selected by 59% of respondents — is that digital
media prevents children from getting physical
exercise. In other words, kids are playing video
games inside at the expense of running around
outside. Meanwhile, only about a quarter of
parents believe that digital media is bad for
other aspects of a child’s health, such as his/her
posture, eyesight, or hearing. Online privacy
and safety, on the other hand, ranked second
highest (after exercise) as a source of anxiety,
with 53% of respondents sharing this concern.
A substantial portion of parents believes that
playing with digital media infringes on the time
kids should be spending on other activities (52%),
with friends or family (41%), or working on school
assignments (33%).
Bought our
child things to
support their
technology
learning
Learned
something
technical
from our child
Figure 6: Parents regulate their child’s media
use for different reasons. Check any of the
statements below that you agree with.
I try to limit the time my child spends with
technology because I:
59%
Believe it prevents my child from getting
physical activity or exercise.
54%
Am concerned about my child’s privacy
and safety online.
52%
Believe it takes up time my child should
be spending on other activities.
42%
Believe that some videogames are too violent.
41%
Believe it takes up time my child should
be spending with friends or family.
33%
Believe it takes up time my child should
be spending on academic work.
27%
Believe it’s bad for my child’s health, such
as his/her posture, eyesight, hearing, etc.
18%
Think my child spends too much time
with technology.
8%
I don’t agree with any of these statements.
21
Despite concerns about maintaining a healthy
balance of physical, social, and cognitive activities
for their young children, only 18% of parents
indicated their own kids spend too much time
with digital media. In fact, most parents believe
that technology in general is important to their
children’s success in school (73%), as well as to
their future career choices (65%; see Figure 7). This
ambivalence about the benefits and drawbacks of
raising children in a digital household also surfaced
in their responses about video games. While 42%
of parents think that some video games can be
too violent, 69% believe that certain types can help
kids develop skills important to their academic
success. Fifty-seven percent agree with the
statement that games give kids opportunities
to practice interpersonal skills like cooperating,
negotiating, and communicating.
Parents may be open to the notion of video games
as 21st-century learning environments, but when
asked to choose the tech activity that holds most
potential for their child’s learning, the greatest
number of respondents — 47% — chose computerbased pursuits such as word processing, photo
editing, programming, and graphic design (see
Figure 8). Exploring the Internet trailed far behind
as the second most selected activity at 19%,
followed by playing video games on the computer
at 18%. Watching television, the media activity
that parents most often do with their children
(see previous section), ranked fourth, with only 9%
of respondents selecting this pastime. A mere 6%
believe that playing games on a TV-based console
has the most educational potential, another
display of parental ambivalence about the worth
of video games, particularly on this platform.
Figure 7: Which of these statements about the
benefits of technology, if any, do you agree
with? (Check all that apply)
73%
I believe that computers and technology
in general are important to my child’s
success in school.
69%
I believe that certain types of video
games can help children develop skills
important to their academic success
(for example, math, reading, science,
foreign language learning).
65%
I believe that computers and technology
in general are important to my child’s
future career choices.
57%
I believe that certain types of video games
give children practice in cooperating,
negotiating, communicating, and other
people skills.
7%
I don’t agree with any of these
statements.
Figure 8: Which of the following do you think has the most educational potential for your child? (Select just one)
100%
80%
60%
40%
47%
20%
19%
18%
9%
0%
Computer
activities
besides games
or the Internet
22
Exploring or
surfing the
Internet
Playing
games on
the computer
Watching
television
6%
Playing games
on a TV-based
console
1%
Playing games
on a mobile
device or
phone
Playing games on a mobile device or phone ranked
last; only 1% of parents selected this option. This
isn’t to say, however, that parents find mobile
devices to hold the least potential for learning. Given
only one selection, it simply wasn’t the pastime
that parents considered most enlightening. Cell
phones and other mobile devices may simply be
viewed as less appropriate platforms for 3- to
10-year-olds. In a separate question, we asked
parents to indicate the youngest age at which
a child should be allowed to play with (a) smart
phones and (b) regular cell phones owned by either
the child or an adult. Three-quarters of parents
don’t believe kids younger than age 7 should be
using regular cell phones, and 83% don’t believe
kids younger than age 7 should be using smart
phones. Ownership is a different matter: 73% of
parents think it’s inappropriate for children under
the age of 13 to own smart phones, while only
40% of parents think it’s inappropriate for children
under the age of 13 to own regular phones.
Rules and restrictions
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2001
guidelines recommended that parents discourage
babies (ages < 2) from watching TV and limit
children’s (ages 2+) total media time to two hours
of “quality programming” per day (American
Academy of Pediatrics, 2001). A few years later,
Jordan, Hersey, McDivitt, and Heitzler (2006) found
that while most parents were aware of the AAP’s
recommendations, less than half enforced them
at home. They identified a number of reasons why,
including parents’ own heavy viewing practices;
the role that TV plays in family routines; the use
of the set as an affordable babysitter; the belief
that kids deserve downtime away from school;
and a lack of concern over the potentially harmful
effects of too much TV.
Today, new media platforms are populating
American households faster than the AAP or
other expert agencies can offer research-grounded
guidelines around them. In the absence of such
advice, are parents setting limits on newer media
as they enter the home? Twenty-two percent of
the parents we surveyed say they have strict rules
around what their kids can and can’t do with
home-based technologies, while 8% say they
have rules but don’t always strongly enforce them
(see Figure 9). Only 7% of parents claim to have
no rules. But most parents — a full 64% — prefer
to restrict their kids’ activities on a case-by-case
basis rather than impose a firm set of rules.
Figure 9: What rules are in place for your child
when it comes to technology? (Select just one)
100%
80%
60%
64%
40%
20%
22%
0%
Rather than
There
a firm set
are strict
of rules, we
rules
consider
regarding
everything media use
on a case-byat the
case basis
house
8%
7%
There
are rules
but they
are not
strongly
enforced
There
are no
rules
Restrictions by platform
Household rules around video games, mobile
devices, and the Internet differ by platform and
even specific activity. Forty-seven percent of
parents don’t let their 3- through 10-year-olds
use mobile devices. Video games, the Internet,
and TV, meanwhile, are far less often prohibited,
at respective rates of 8%, 9%, and 3%.
Of the parents who do let their kids use electronic
devices, most place some type of time or content
restriction on their usage. Only 18% of parents say
they limit how much time their children spend
using mobile devices. Perhaps kids have more
control over where and when they can play on
these more personal, portable platforms. Nearly
equal numbers of parents enforce time restrictions
on the Internet, video games, and TV — from
37% to 40% — as these platforms tend to be more
stationary, if not more easily monitored by adults,
and less likely to be owned by the child than
mobile devices.
23
Parents were more likely to vary by platform in
their content restrictions. Twenty-seven percent of
parents let their kids surf the Internet as long as
the sites they visit are educational, and 14% of
parents hold the same criterion for the TV shows
they let their kids watch. Fewer parents hold video
games and mobile devices — media regarded
more for their entertainment and communication
than educational capacities — to these content
standards, at 11% and 5%, respectively.
What lurks in cyberspace
Children’s Internet use is monitored or limited in
97% of homes, more often than video games (94%)
or television (92%). In other words, only 3% of
parents let their kids freely surf the web. Fueled
by frequent headlines about Internet predators
and cyberbullying, parental concern over who or
what lurks online is further reflected in the statistic
that 70% of households with children ages 3
through 10 have parental controls set on the
family computer.
Parents are generally open to letting their kids
visit sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz; only
25% of parents prohibit virtual worlds for kids.
But they’re wary of social networking sites like
MySpace, and of chatting online. About 70% of
parents don’t permit their kids to engage in these
two activities, and 58% don’t let their kids surf
the Internet freely (see Figure 10). Furthermore,
of parents who let their kids play video games,
only 47% allow them to play Internet-based
games, versus 63% who allow gaming on TVbased consoles like the Wii or PS3, and 68%
who allow Nintendo DSes, iPod touches, and
other handheld gaming devices.
What matters about mobile
As previously mentioned, 47% of parents don’t
let their 3- through 10-year-olds play with mobile
devices, including cell phones, MP3 players, or
gaming devices like the Nintendo DS. Of those
who do, most are open to letting their kids listen
to music; only 22% restrict this particular activity
(see Figure 11). For the most part, parents are
permissive about their kids using mobile devices
for non-connected uses like gaming and music
— it’s the texting and talking that worries them.
Of parents who allow their kids to play with
mobile devices, 95% restrict their use in some way.
Only half let their kids text, and 38% don’t let them
talk on the phone. This coincides with parental
wariness over chatting and social network activity
on the Internet illustrated in Figure 10.
Age matters
Child age was found to predict rule setting.
Interestingly, the relationship between age and
rules is not linear: the percentage of children
who have rules regarding media use actually peaks
at around age 7, and then declines as children grow
older. Furthermore, most parents with children
ages 6 and under do not set parental controls
on their computers, while most parents with
children ages 7 and older do. Parent age was also
Figure 10: Which activities, if any, do you restrict your child from doing on the Internet? (Select all that apply)
100%
80%
60%
70%
70%
58%
40%
48%
25%
20%
12%
0%
Visiting social
networking
sites
24
Chatting
online
Surfing the
Internet
E-mail
Working on
projects (e.g.,
websites, blogs,
videos, photos)
Other
Internetbased
activities
found to predict rule setting. The oldest parents
we surveyed (ages 50+) were most likely to set
rules around their children’s technology use,
while the youngest (under 30) were least likely,
even when controlling for the age of the child.
Figure 11: Which activities, if any, do you restrict
your child from doing on mobile devices?
(Select all that apply)
100% *
80%
60%
40%
50%
38%
20%
35%
22%
Parent concerns and perceptions about
digital media
Lack of exercise and online privacy are parents’
greatest concerns.
r Fewer than 1 in 5 parents think their kids spend
too much time with digital media…
r …Yet 40% believe these activities infringe on time
that would otherwise be spent with real people.
r Almost half of parents consider some video
games too violent, but 7 out of 10 believe games
can help kids develop skills for academic success.
r Parents rate the educational value of the Internet
and video games higher than TV, while very few
see the educational potential of mobile devices
and phones.
r Three quarters of parents don’t believe kids
younger than age 7 should use cell phones,
much less own them.
r
0%
Texting
on a cell
phone
Talking
on a cell
phone
Listening
to music
None of
the above
* Of parents who let their 3- through 10-year-olds play with
mobile devices
summary of survey findings
Here is a rundown of the survey results just
described:
Access to media in the home
r Video
games are popular, but TV is still the most
popular medium in homes.
r Mobile devices have a way to go with this age set.
Intergenerational play and learning
Parents prefer media they enjoyed as children.
Parents view digital media as being for fun more
than for learning.
r Less intergenerational play is taking place on
newer media.
r More than a third of parents have learned
something technical from their child.
r
Rules and restrictions
Rule setting peaks when children are about 7
years old. Parents with older children (ages 7+)
are more likely to set parental controls on their
computers.
r Nearly two-thirds of parents say they restrict
their kids’ activities on a case-by-case basis.
r Parents are much more likely to prohibit mobile
devices (47%) than the Internet (9%), video games
(8%), and TV (3%).
r About 40% of parents impose time limits on their
kids’ TV, Internet, and video game use.
r Parents restrict the Internet more than any other
platform, and are particularly wary of chatting
and social networking.
r Parents are open to letting their kids use mobile
devices for gaming and music, but more hesitant
to permit use of their phone capabilities (i.e.,
talking and texting).
r Older parents (over 50) set rules more often
than younger parents (under 30).
r
r
25
case study: gabriella guzman
Hector: I want her to have a childhood as a child as I did, as
my wife did. And I think that’s a big platform, background,
backbone, so that when you grow up, you can say, “Well, you
know, I enjoyed my childhood, I scraped my knees, I went out
there, I did that...” This is going to be there all the time. And
there’s going to be a lot more development 10 years from now.
Claudia: There’s kids that don’t play baseball anymore!
They don’t ride their bikes anymore. You know, they’re pale!
They’re just indoors… They need to be out.
26
The Guzman family
The Guzmans are lifelong Dodgers fans. Hector
and Claudia were both born in the City of Los
Angeles and grew up in neighborhoods with clear
views of the palm tree-circled hilltop stadium.
Now they rent a two-bedroom apartment in
Highland Park, a section of LA nested between
the city’s downtown and the rolling hills and
green spaces of the Arroyo Seco River tributary.
Since the 1970s, Highland Park has been a primarily
Hispanic community with a mixture of new
Central American immigrants and families of
Mexican descent.
Claudia has three adult sons by a previous marriage:
Steven (31), Michael (28), and Devon (21) (See Figure
12). Steven and Michael have families with children
about the same age as Gabriela, and Devon lives
at Michael’s house. Gabriela is essentially an only
child, but her half-brothers, nieces and nephews,
and all the children living in her apartment
complex constantly surround her during the
non-school hours of her life. On school days,
Claudia looks after her granddaughter Dora —
Gabriela’s niece just one year her junior — because
her daughter-in-law is burdened at home with
a newborn and toddler. Gabriela and Dora also
attend the same school. Jessica (11) and Stacey
(7), sisters from across the courtyard, are at the
Guzman’s as often as they are in their own
apartment. As far as Claudia is concerned, the
notion of family extends beyond blood relatives
to include neighbors and nearby friends, which
effectively distributes childcare responsibilities
across several homes in this primarily working
class community.
Digital immigrants
Hector and Claudia are in their late 40s. They didn’t
grow up using computers, but technology has
become part of their daily lives at home and work.
Hector has been working in telecommunications
since graduating from high school. He has an AA
degree in electronic engineering and is taking
courses towards his bachelor’s in the same while he
works full-time as a wireless technician. Although
Hector is considered a technical expert at work,
at home it’s a different story:
Well, I don’t touch the computer much. Only
my wife or I see Gabriela, you know, fiddling
around with it a little bit. Um, and the reason
I don’t use it too much is because all day
long I’m looking at monitors and... I work in
communications. And so when I get home
that’s really the last thing I want to do, or
even answer the phone.
Figure 12: Family relationships between the case study girls
Hector
Claudia
Gabriella
Guzman
Victor
Juan
Ana
Lisa
Devon
Michael
Maria
Steven
Aracely
Dora
Junior
Lila
Sierra
Ramirez
Stephen
Carlos
Deirdre
27
The Guzmans bought their Dell computer in
February of 2007, which is also when they signed
up for high-speed DSL. Before that they had a
dial-up Internet connection for their first home
computer, purchased in 2003. Hector calls the Dell
his wife’s domain since Claudia has managed
to surpass him in her knowledge of its Windows
Vista operating system. In fact, Hector might be
considered somewhat of a Luddite as a result
of hearing too many stories about technology
addiction, such as the one his coworker recently
shared:
And it’s my understanding that her son is maybe
4, 5-years-old. […] And they get all those CDs and
they play all those games. So, from listening to
her, it sounds to me that he’s, as soon as he gets
home from school and finishes his homework
and what have you, he gets glued to that thing
for hours on end. […] And it’s coming to the
point when it’s time for dinner, he doesn’t want
to eat because he wants to limit the time for
eating so that he can get back to doing this thing.
So it absorbs their mind and that’s something
we do not ever want for us to happen here.
Instead, Hector and Claudia want Gabriela to
enjoy the “humble, simple” joys of childhood
— friends, family, baseball, and many of the same
things that kept them entertained when they
were kids: “I wanted to be outside,” Claudia told
us, “And that was like in the ‘60s. So at that time
going outside and playing with your bike and
playing ball, that was the thing to do.” She also
recalls her mother warning her, “’Your brain’s
going to turn to mush if you watch too much
television!’” Now, as a parent herself, Claudia
echoes her mother’s sentiments about “getting
immersed into that screen. […] It’s not good for
their eyes; it’s not good for their minds.”
Today, computers play a central role in Claudia’s
occupation as an employment specialist, as the
job search process has migrated almost entirely
online. About a decade ago, she had no choice
but to learn to operate a PC if she wanted to keep
her job. What was once done by hand at the work
source center Claudia worked for would now be
done on the computers, “And I was really afraid to
[try] it,” she recalled, “I was just afraid I was going
to break it, and for the longest time.” Steven,
28
Michael, and Devon saw their mother through
this transition several years ago:
I think that most of my technology skills began
with [my sons]. Because they’d say, “Don’t be
afraid, Mom. Look, this is what you have to do.
You can do this, you can do that.” Or I would
tell them, “You know, I want to do this, I need
to do that.” And they’d get it going for me
and they’d help me. Claudia’s youngest son
especially coached her throughout this phase.
Born in 1988 and now in his early 20s, Devon
continues to support his mom technology-wise,
and is now doing the same for his little sister.
Media in the home
Devon is the one who introduced Gabriela to Club
Penguin, uploads songs onto her MP3 player, and
for Christmas bought her the Nintendo DS that
her parents didn’t want her to have. Hector and
Claudia ended up letting Gabriela keep the DS,
but only because Devon wouldn’t be able to get a
full refund for the expensive gift. They realize that
Gabriela is going to gain access to these spaces
one way or another, whether it’s through them or
someone else, such as an older brother, a friend
at school, or on her own.
To the extent that they can, the Guzmans limit what
media enter their home. Technology-wise, they
live quite modestly: In the living room, there’s a
22-inch television set with DVD player and cable
box, plus a small stereo system. Hector and Claudia
have an older TV plus the Dell PC and an all-in-one
printer in their bedroom. Both parents own cell
phones, and Claudia has a point-and-shoot digital
camera. Besides Gabriela’s personal portables
— the DS, MP3 player, and an MP4 video player
that her cousin David gave her for her birthday
— a Timex clock radio CD player is the only other
electronic device she gets to keep in her room.
Her parents haven’t put a TV set in her bedroom
“because we don’t want her to get herself emerged
in television, closing the door, you know, blocking
us out, not coming down for conversations.”
And, like the TV set, the Guzmans keep the family
computer out in the open, in their bedroom, where
Gabriela can’t shut them out.
Hector says he doesn’t want Gabriela just “sitting
there and playing some kind of game that she will
not learn anything out of,” and so, for the most
part, only purchases media items that he believes
will benefit his daughter. When Gabriela was five,
for instance, they bought her an electronic play
laptop that had activities to “help her spell words
or do math. So that’s where she started getting
used to using a computer. She knew they were
basically play computers, not real computers. But
they were learning computers.” Hector and Claudia
also gave her a LeapPad because they thought it
would help her learn to read. The only gadget
they’ve bought Gabriela just for fun is her pink
MP3 player. They also pay $6 per month for her
Club Penguin membership, as they’ve recognized
its social value in connecting Gabriela with her
niece Sierra (7) and nephew Stephen (9).
Given the Guzman’s otherwise unassuming media
inventory, it comes as a surprise that they gave
8-year-old Gabriela a cell phone. When Hector
lost his phone on a recent trip to Mexico, his
employer replaced it with a company unit. Since
he was obligated to pay for the lost phone’s service
through the end of its contract, he switched the
line over to his wife’s old Motorola RAZR when
she got an upgrade for Christmas. Gabriela’s phone
came at basically no cost, but Hector decided to
lend his daughter the spare phone for practical
purposes: to help her mother coordinate family
errands, and to keep in touch with them during
the day. What they hadn’t anticipated is that
Gabriela would use the lavender device for fun
and develop such an expensive texting habit
along the way (see opening vignette).
Playing and learning together
Hector and Claudia don’t mind when Gabriela
goes online or watches television when she’s with
them. In fact, they cherish when the family “can
sit in the evening and watch certain shows that
we like to watch, like Everybody Loves Raymond
and Seinfeld and those comedy shows makes us
laugh” (Claudia). On a typical weekday afternoon,
Claudia, Gabriela, and Dora spend 30 minutes of
pre-homework TV watching Sabrina the Teenage
Witch or Phineas & Ferb while chatting about their
school days and snacking on popcorn. This is a
daily ritual equally treasured by Claudia and the
girls. Weekend movie nights are also cherished,
and Hector and the neighborhood girls also attend.
The computer is a tool, not a toy
Inspired to visit the Disney Channel website after
hearing her friends talk about it, Gabriela asked
her father to help her get online for the first time
at age 7. Since then, Claudia’s been showing her
daughter more sophisticated uses of the family PC.
Consistent with her belief “that the computer is
a tool, and it’s not a toy,” Claudia taught Gabriela
Microsoft Word when she turned 8. Now Claudia is
teaching her Excel and 10-key, which is analogous
to touch-typing on the number pad. And Gabriela
enjoys it. According to Claudia, “Whatever interests
her, you know? It’s kind of like a little game for her.”
These lessons fall in line with the other nontechnical activities that mother and daughter
“bond” over — as Gabriela likes to say — like
dancing, baking cookies, and trying out new
recipes from shows they watch together on the
Food Network. There’s no real pressure on Gabriela
to master these technical skills; mom and daughter
do it mostly for fun.
Claudia recently took on the role of teaching a
basic computer course for Spanish-speaking
immigrant job seekers at the local community
college. As a self-proclaimed learner herself, she
needed assurance that her customization of the
existing curriculum would meet the needs of this
special audience. “So that’s where Gabriela came
in because everything I was writing, I was running
it by her first and see if it works. And well, if it works
with a third grader, then I’m sure that women will
be able to understand it.” Both Gabriela and Claudia
got something out of this partnership: Claudia
used her daughter’s feedback to tweak the course’s
content before taking it to her students and,
according to Gabriela, “I did an autobiography.
And she taught me how to do the font and the
color and how to print it. So, I like doing that.”
Role reversals and role models
Father and daughter, meanwhile, bond over the
text messages they send one another during the
day when Hector is at work. Hector taught Gabriela
how to operate the voice and text functions of her
cell phone (see opening vignette), and continues
29
to serve as her go-to guy for wireless support. But
every once in a while, Gabriela gets to help her
father out: Given his technology-filled workday,
Hector rarely touches the PC. He does find YouTube
amusing, but needs some help getting there.
According to Claudia,
She always helps her dad with YouTube. He
gets lost. He still cannot just sit down and log
on “y-o-u-t-u-b-e dot com” for some reason.
And he’ll be “Gabriela! Gabriela!” You know,
and she’ll come up here and she’ll fix his
mess, whatever all websites he put up there.
Gabriela is also the one to set up the DVD player
for family movie nights, again because even after
“dealing with all of these gadgets and spectrums”
all day long, Hector can’t recall how to get it to
work. “So when I get home and when I want to
use this, or I want put it on or I want to turn it off
or I want to open it up, guess who’s doing it? She’s
doing it for me.”
Otherwise, as the primary breadwinner of the
family, Hector doesn’t get to spend as much time
as he’d like to doing technology-based activities
with Gabriela. But he has noticed the subtler ways
in which Gabriela is learning from her mother:
In January, she’s going to have a slumber party,
okay? And being that she sees her mom putting
out documents and making everything really
nice in the Windows Word, she’s doing the same
thing also. In fact just yesterday or the night
before, she’s putting her little program together
in very nice fonts. And she’s maneuvering to
the Word doc — you know, all options they have
there on her own, and I’m not even suggesting
anything. I’m just standing right behind her
watching her do these things!
As Hector points out, Gabriela is probably picking
up many of her technical skills just by watching
her mother go about her business on the computer.
Parent attitudes towards and rules around
technology
The Guzmans worry about Gabriela getting
completely “sucked into the television or sucked
into the videogames or sucked into the computer,”
30
the way Hector’s coworker’s son has. Consequently,
Hector and Claudia prohibit Gabriela from playing
video games, which they feel are not only addicting,
but violent, too. This is why Gabriela only plays
the DS when her father isn’t around — in the car
with her mom or upstairs in her bedroom. She
knows exactly how he feels about video games.
The Guzmans also limit Gabriela’s exposure to
media she does have access to in their home.
Upon arriving home from school, she’s allowed
to watch one half-hour show on TV before she
needs to get cracking on her homework. In the
evenings she can watch more TV because she
watches with her parents. Gabriela always asks
for permission to log on to Club Penguin, and
knows by now that if there are friends, family,
or neighbors around, spending time with them
takes priority over hanging out on Club Penguin
alone, as does playing outside when the weather
is fine. If none of the neighbors are around to play,
Gabriela will ask her mom to use the computer.
If they do come knocking, Claudia shouts, “The
girls are outside, log off.”
Due to these priorities and to a car-sharing
schedule that prohibits long stretches of online
play, Gabriela logs on to Club Penguin maybe three
times during the school week. On days that Hector
takes the car to work, Gabriela is more likely to
play afterschool because she doesn’t have to go
with her mom to pick her dad up from Monrovia at
5:00 p.m. When Gabriela does go online, according
to Claudia, “We don’t let her stay on for more
than like two hours. Then we’ll make her get off.
And then she can get back on later on.” Gabriela
understands that these time limits have a purpose:
“My dad has a few rules. He said that I can’t be on
there too long because then I’ll be like, ‘No, this is
boring,’ and then I won’t want to use it anymore.”
Hector worries in particular about his daughter’s
solitary consumption of entertainment media
because, “If we allowed her to access the Internet
or go onto certain websites, you know, she could
get into some kind of trouble or people talking to
her, you know, you see those photos on television.”
So they’ve set the parental controls on their
computer, and Gabriela is only allowed to visit
websites that at least one parent has seen and
approved. Claudia believes that this and the other
ways they monitor Gabriela’s technology activities
will “hopefully instill that in her and teach her,
you know, for the same reason we teach her not
to go out to the sidewalk.” Through these actions,
Gabriela’s parents are teaching her common sense
about everything — not just about staying safe on
the Internet — just as she and her husband had
to develop common sense playing outside when
they were her age.
In setting restrictions on Gabriela’s media diet,
the Guzmans do not believe that they are limiting
her development as a citizen of the 21st century.
They want Gabriela to be successful in her
schooling and life beyond, but do not believe that
her participation in technology activities is
critical to her achieving this success, at least not
as an 8-year-old. For now, in Hector’s view:
My focus is to for her to grow up as a child. Enjoy
her childhood and then when it comes to […]
high school or college or university. When it
comes for her to, you know, get focused on that,
then that’s when we’ll go focus on that. At this
point at her age, that is, as I said earlier, not a
priority at all. So I don’t even enforce her to, or
encourage her to do this or do that.
and, so far, she rarely objects to their reasoning.
After overhearing her parents’ conversations
about Dora’s red eyes (according to Claudia, Dora
“gets so into [her DS], her eyes are like red, red,
red, and big black rings under her eyes”), Hector’s
coworker’s son, and so on, Gabriela is bound to
believe that playing video games can’t be good
for her. In fact, Gabriela often echoes her parents’
attitudes and values about technology. When
asked, for instance, how often she plays with her
DS, she answered, “Not every day where I would get
addicted to it,” and “I don’t like sleep with my DS
close because I don’t want to start playing it because
I know that I have to get a good night’s sleep.”
Claudia also wants Gabriela to enjoy childhood,
but differs somewhat from her husband on this
point “because technology is what it is now, and
it’s going to get even further. I mean it’s not going
to go backwards, if anything. So I want her to know
the stuff, and I want her to know once again that
it’s a tool she can use to do her work better.” As
Claudia discovered first-hand in the late 1990s, it’s
necessary to keep up with the latest technologies
in order to remain marketable in the 21st-century
workforce. This may explain why she insists
that Gabriela’s engagement with digital media
transcends pure entertainment, and why she is
teaching her daughter basic computer skills after
school, while Hector is away at work.
Claudia says she “keep[s] stressing that the
computer is a tool, and it’s not a toy. So just because
you’re playing games on it doesn’t mean you’re
playing with a toy. You’re using a tool to access
a game. And she understands that.” Her parents
share with her the reasons behind their rules
31
case study: sierra ramirez
Steven: She had them on five things on
one day. It was overwhelming. It was
like, “Oh my God.” We literally…
Aracely: Well, I think Sierra overheard
him say “overwhelming” because she
dropped out. She’s like, “You’re tiring
me!” Yah, but there was a point when
she was doing ballet and tap and then
soccer.
Steven: After soccer we’d go to ballet.
You know, we’re taking off her cleats
and putting on ballet shoes!
Aracely: Squeezing her into the tutu.
Like yah, it’s like literally, it was bad.
[Laughter.]
The Ramirez family
When Sierra Ramirez speaks, she does so with
a clarity and assuredness that belies her barely
7 years of age. The second grader has a dark
complexion, thick eyelashes, and a round face
that, when smiling, reveals a dimple as deep as
they get. Her best friend — and foe, which can vary
moment to moment — is her 9-year-old brother
Stephen. As a young child, Stephen was diagnosed
with verbal apraxia and now speaks with a
pronounced speech impediment, exacerbated
when he’s excited about the topic of conversation.
When Stephen speaks, Sierra listens on and
inserts the occasional clarification or elaboration
whenever she thinks it will add to the listener’s
understanding. She’s been doing this for years,
acting as an interpreter of sorts for her older
32
brother and, more generally, like the older sibling
in the pair, owing to a deadpan sense of humor
in stark contrast to her brother’s intense energy.
Sierra and Stephen’s parents are a similar study in
contrasts. Their mother Aracely is a petite woman,
talkative and full of energy. At age 28, she works
full-time as a legal secretary and is enrolled in the
pastry and bakery extended program at Le Cordon
Bleu, her “dream come true!” She keeps her kids
equally occupied, sending them to a program-rich
afterschool center during the week, and to dance,
swimming, music, and soccer on the weekends.
She packs their schedules because when she and
her husband were kids, “we were never a part of
it. I was never a part of anything. So […] we just
try to keep them in anything that’s active.”
Their dad Steven (with a “v”) is mellow compared
to his wife, but maintains an equally busy pace of
life as a property manager. New technologies help
him stay on top of things. The 31-year-old uses a
Palm Treo, for example, to keep up with paperwork
when he’s out in the field, generating invoices and
soliciting bids from potential contractors with
emailed photos of the repair work to be done. The
smartphone-PDA also provides three modes of
coordinating family matters with his wife during
the day: voice, email, and text. And yet, the couple
jokes, they still have difficulty reaching one another.
Steven and Aracely text — he on his Treo, she on her
BlackBerry — “all day long, all day long…”
Electronic gadgets have always fascinated Steven,
a third-generation Mexican-American. He started
playing video games when he was Sierra’s age and
still plays them today at age 31. But technology
is more than just a diversion for Steven. He took
formal courses in computer repair, did an internship
at CompUSA, and worked in imaging for a few years.
Aracely developed her technical chops later in
life — unlike Steven, she didn’t have access to
computers or video games as a child — but is
now confident in her competence, which she
developed through her paralegal duties. The
Internet, they explained, holds the family together.
They have come to depend on it so much for its
communication and information capabilities that
“without it, we’re lifeless.”
Media in the home
The Ramirezes own their two-bedroom, one-bath
home, which is located on a quiet, palm-tree lined
street in Atwater Village, a primarily Hispanic
neighborhood of Los Angeles. Aracely’s family —
her parents and sister Lisa’s family — live on the
lot behind the Ramirez’s, making for lots of twoway traffic between the two households. Aracely’s
mother often feeds the families of her two
daughters, who both have full-time jobs but not
always time to cook after work. Both grandparents,
as well as Lisa and Lisa’s 13-year-old daughter
Deirdre can keep an eye on Sierra and Stephen
when their own parents can’t. In total, 10 family
members reside in the two adjacent homes, and all
participate in some way in Sierra’s media practices.
The Ramirezes access the Internet by way of a
desktop PC that sits in the kitchen, and a laptop
that is used most often at the dining room table
and has come to be known as “the kids’ computer.”
Steven and Aracely also own Internet enabled
smart phones. There are three televisions in the
house: the largest in the living room, plus smaller
sets in the parents’ and kids’ bedrooms. Beneath
their 50-inch flat screen sit five gaming consoles
— a Game Cube, Xbox, PlayStation 2, Nintendo Wii,
and V-tech V-smile — plus a DVD player. Steven
purchased the older-model Game Cube for himself,
before the kids were old enough to play, but the
Xbox and PS2 were hand-me-downs, one from
Aracely’s brother and the other from Steven’s
brother. The V-smile was relatively inexpensive,
and “we bought that because that has like alphabet
games and that has more of the educational
stuff.” The Wii is the newest and now the most
often played of the family’s gaming consoles.
Steven and Aracely spent a year and a half
deliberating over whether to purchase it, and
finally gave in this past Christmas. Ultimately,
“we purchased it because we figured we liked
the fact that we could play together,” said Aracely.
“The Wii’s family time, is what we call it.”
Technology is everywhere in the Ramirez household, seamlessly integrated into family routines.
Because Sierra has always had clear access to
electronic toys and tools, Aracely and Stephen
were unable to name the exact age at which she
started using technology on a regular basis. They
bought her and Stephen LeapFrog toys and a
V-tech play computer when they were preschool
age, but it still surprised Aracely when she saw
little Sierra operating the mouse on the family
PC one day, unassisted, as though she had just
“figured it out.”
Spending decisions
Just 20 months apart in age, Sierra and Stephen
share a bedroom and a bedroom TV set. They each
have an iPod Shuffle, although Sierra reports that
when her uncle gave just Stephen one, “I thought
it wasn’t really too fair. So my mom let me have
hers.” Stephen also owns two Game Boys — an
older model that his parents purchased on sale,
and one that was given to him as a gift. According
to Steven, Sierra and Stephen ask for “everything,
everything, everything,” especially what they see
on TV. His usual response to the kids’ pleas is, “No,
it’s expensive.” His wife is more likely to answer,
“You don’t need it.” Aracely says she tries to limit
their toy purchases to “stuff we know they’re going
to play with, like all the time,” and to specific themes
that the kids have developed deep interests in
over the years. They’re more likely to buy Sierra
Barbie and Polly Pockets-themed toys because
they know she will play with them. And it took a
month of the kids being utterly absorbed by the
free version of Club Penguin for their parents to see
that subscribing to the paid version would be worth
it. Aracely and Steven acknowledge that their kids
are more than sufficiently outfitted technologywise — they point to the kids’ overflowing bedroom
shelves as evidence of this.
But many of the Ramirez’s media expenditures
aren’t just for the kids. Steven purchased the Sega
and Game Cube for his own amusement before
the kids were old enough to play. And perhaps
because he also loved board games as a child,
his kids now have “stacks and stacks” of these
non-digital diversions in their bedroom, too.
While Sierra and Stephen enjoy playing Stratego,
Battleship, Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and
even chess, their parents bought these games
because as adults, they still find them entertaining.
Aracely is a Scrabble fiend and is training her kids
on this sophisticated board game at home.
33
Playing and learning together
The pace of modern family life
The Ramirezes live a comfortably middle-class
lifestyle, but this lifestyle has its costs, and may
in part explain why Steven and Aracely do not
completely indulge Sierra and Stephen’s every
media request. As homeowners, they have a
mortgage to pay, plus they invest some portion
of their disposable income on the “concerted
cultivation” (Lareau, 2003) of their children
through art, performance, and athletic programs.
They also send Sierra and Stephen to a charter
school dedicated to the arts, plus a Mondaythrough-Friday afterschool program that offers
regular computer instruction. The kids have also
attended, at one time or another, a music conservatory for guitar, piano, singing, and harmonica
lessons, dance and tap class, bilingual acting,
soccer league, and Saturday morning swim lessons.
By the time Sierra and Stephen arrive home
around 6:00 p.m., they’re beat. Steven recounted,
with a chuckle that after being dropped at home
by the carpool, his son “throws his jacket, goes,
‘Oh, what a day!’” Aracely added, “I feel like they
just, you know, they come home they kick off
their shoes and they do what they want. Like at
that point they’ve already read, they’ve already
had everything under the sun.” So she lets them
relax, eat dinner, and watch TV until their 9:00
bedtime, but not without some guilt over this
routine: “And there’s probably like some parents
that look at me like that’s way too much television. […] I let them. I feel horrible.” At the same
time, letting the kids occupy themselves with
TV, the Wii, or Club Penguin allows Aracely and
Steven to cook dinner, catch up on household
chores, and have a little downtime after long
days at the office. “It makes it easier on us,” says
Aracely, “It’s a really good sitter.”
Club Penguin store. According to Aracely, Sierra’s
cousin Deirdre is:
just too cool to play with this. So her excuse to
play with this is that she’s playing with the kids.
She’s a huge fan of Club Penguin, but she’s 13.
So, I don’t know what the cutoff is, but she’s
constantly on there with them. And then my
sister, she’s a receptionist, and she’s constantly
playing Club Penguin at work. And she actually
plays at work and earns tons of coins for them.
So when they come home they’re like totally
rich. Like they can buy everything. They bought
like the latest and greatest igloo.
Sierra and Stephen’s 8-year-old aunt Gabriela
Guzman (previous case study) is also a member of
the Ramirez children’s Club Penguin network, but
has a separate account and earns coins for her
penguin by herself. Gabriela’s older half-brother
Devon is the one who first introduced Club Penguin
to his brother Steven’s kids and to Gabriela. On
occasion, Stephen and Gabriela call each other on
the phone — they live a 20-minute drive apart —
so that they can see each other’s penguins online
and exchange greetings using the chat feature.
Little Stephen has come to be known as the Club
Penguin expert across the extended family. Both
Sierra and Gabriela say that they learned much
of what they know about the virtual world from
Stephen. For Christmas this past year, Stephen
bought his sister a Club Penguin cheats book, but
as the CP enthusiast in the family, he’s the only
one who directly consults it. Stephen showed
her, for instance, how to freeze the water in his
penguin’s fishbowl, and how to change the channel
on the TV set inside his penguin’s igloo. Stephen
also shared with Gabriela the secret to catching
the big mullet in the Ice Fishing mini-game, a
trick passed on from his school friend Nikolai.
Like daughter, like mother
The family penguin network
Family members living in the two adjacent
households play games on Club Penguin to raise
funds for Stephen’s single penguin account, and
have collectively earned enough to furnish its
palatial igloo with all sorts of goodies from the
34
Sierra enjoys playing Club Penguin with Stephen,
typically sitting side-by-side in front of the laptop.
But she is less enthusiastic about CP and digital
media in general than her brother is. Given the
choice, the 7-year-old prefers to watch TV, play
with her Barbie and Polly Pocket dolls, or print
pages from the NickJr.com website and color
them in with her crayons. Both siblings used to
take typing lessons at their afterschool program,
but according to Sierra, “now I don’t like it so
only he does it.” Stephen, on the other hand,
has developed an identity as the tech enthusiast
among extended family members — including his
grandparents on both sides — a distinction that
may be attributed in part to his use of computers
at school and at home to treat his verbal apraxia.
When we asked Sierra and Stephen to show us
their new gaming system, Sierra seemed more
excited to walk us through designing a Wii Mii
character7 than playing the games themselves.
She admitted, “I get scared I might lose on boxing,
so I mostly just play by myself.” Apparently, the
competitive aspect of video games is a turnoff
for Sierra.
When Sierra does go online, she visits the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network web sites, where she
recently discovered online coloring books and,
according to her father, went “print crazy.” She
figured out how to print the outlines on the family
printer so she could color them in with her crayons
and pens. Her parents had to “change the [printer’s]
defaults because we ran out of ink,” but Sierra then
figured out how to change those, too, so she could
continue coloring this way. Steven and Aracely
attribute their daughter’s fascination with this
activity to the fact that the outlines are coming
from the Internet. More likely, though, Sierra is
still at the developmental stage at which physical
objects are more engaging than virtual ones.
Father-son bonding
Aracely confessed that she isn’t an active player
in Stephen’s Club Penguin network either, not
the way her sister Lisa is. When asked whether
she plays the Wii she recently gave the kids for
Christmas with them, she replied:
They often invite me when I’m like in the
middle of something. It’s like… When I’m
cooking, “Mom do you want to play? Are you
sure?” And I’m, you know, “Do you want to
do that or do you want to eat?” […]You know,
I think I more watch. I think that I like more.
[…] Whenever I’m done doing whatever I’m
doing I like come and hang out.
Like Sierra, Aracely prefers messing around with
the more tangible stuff. She handcrafts Valentines
Day cards, is a scrapbook hobbyist, and is enrolled
in an accredited culinary program, none of which
goes unnoticed by her daughter. Sierra says she
wants to be a “cake baker” when she grows up
“‘cause my mom bakes a lot of cakes so she
inspires me a lot.” And when Sierra visits her
grandmother next door, they watch cooking
shows together.
Steven and Stephen, on the other hand, really
connect on the Wii. Not so much over the content
of the games as the experience of being in the same
room together as they’re playing, learning from
each other’s moves, and egging each other on to
do better. In fact, it’s not unlike their experience
playing sports together. Before the Wii came
along, “I had bought him a new Nerf football,”
says Steven. “So for, you know, like two weeks
straight we were just shooting the ball around.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) on the Wii has
replaced the Nerf, and big Steven — who’s been a
gamer ever since he was his son’s age — says he’s
really enjoying the “bonding.” Aracely has had
to live with her husband’s gaming habit for years
and, in fact, used to protest his buying the latest
gaming console “because I was like always afraid
the homework would fall onto me.” But she was
open to the idea of buying the family-friendly 8 Wii
when it came out, “‘Cause I felt like, well hey, it’s
not like you zone on your own, they can zone with
you, which I think is great. You still have what you
want, but you… [it’s] a little more inclusive.”
Before the Wii, there was never occasion to call
Dad. But now, when Stephen plays Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles alone, he dials his father’s cell number
each time he levels up or faces a novel challenge.
“He calls when we’re out to dinner, ‘Dad, Dad,
Dad! He spy slammed me!’” explains Aracely.
“And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But I
know that it’s like the warriors kicking his butt or
something.” Even more recently, Stephen has begun
to call his dad with board game inquiries, too: “One
time he was playing [Battleship] with his sister
and he was like, “Dad, Dad, can this person kill
this person?” In this way, his Treo allows Steven
to be a part of his son’s game play even when he
is not physically present.
A Mii is an avatar that a Wii player can create to represent oneself in certain Wii games, such as Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and Mario Kart Wii.
The system allows one to customize a Mii by specifying the shape of its head, its eyes, body, hair, eyebrows, nose, and mouth; its gender;
and the color of its outfit. A player can also give the Mii glasses, facial hair, a birth date, and a favorite color.
8
Nintendo has marketed the Wii as a gaming console for families.
7
35
Sibling chefs
After dinner, Stephen tries to rally the whole family
to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the Wii, boys
against girls. Mom passes—she’s already thumbing
through her cookbooks at the kitchen table next to
her husband, trying to figure out what kind of cake
to bake for Deirdre’s birthday next week. Big Steven
is busy too; maybe when he’s finished on the
computer, he says.
But Sierra is game, that is, if they play Cooking
Mama instead. Stephen agrees. He runs over to the
Wii console beneath their 50-inch flat-panel TV to
turn it on while Sierra fetches the Wii Remote from
the basketful of Wii paraphernalia. As soon as the
game launches, she chooses single-player mode,
which is not what Stephen was expecting. “Sierra!
Can we do the cook-off? Sierra? Let’s do the cook-off.”
Sierra ignores her brother’s request to choose
multiplayer mode, and instead proceeds to select
Cream Puffs as their first challenge for the evening.
“Come on, Sieraaaaa….”
“Sierra!” chimes her father from the adjacent
kitchen area, which has a clear view to the TV in the
living room.
“I don’t want to do a cook-off,” declares Sierra.
Aracely continues to mediate, “Stephen, just this
one and the next one. This one and the next one
and that’s it. Then you can play together.” Sierra is
satisfied with the ruling and backs away from the TV
set to sit on the brown leather couch, which is about
15 feet away from the TV. She starts the recipe by
cracking eggs, which requires her to move the
remote the way a symphony conductor might keep
tempo with a baton. Stephen moves in front of the
TV to try to block his sister’s view.
“Hey, I can’t see!”
“Stephen!” is heard from the kitchen.
Stephen drags his feet on his way to the couch,
where he plops himself down on the cushion next to
Sierra and then waves his hand in front of the
36
remote, to try to block his sister’s movements from
the Wii receiver. “Stop it!” whines Sierra, as she
continues cracking eggs.
Stephen perks up when he sees what Sierra has
to do next, which is to stir the pate a choux for
the cream puffs. She draws wide circles with the
remote in her right hand—as prescribed by the
screen instructions—the way a baker would stir
a bowl of batter with a large wooden spoon. She’s
seated at the edge of the couch, legs outstretched
in a wide V, relatively still while she moves her
right arm and upper body quite a bit. “Ugh, I’m
going to get ‘try harder,’” Sierra murmurs under
her breath.
“‘Try harder,’” the two read aloud in unison, Cooking
Mama’s assessment of Sierra’s 35 seconds of
mixing. She advances to the next step, which is to
squeeze the batter from a pastry bag into dollops
on the baking sheet. Stephen is slouched on the
couch but seems to enjoy watching. Cooking
Mama chimes, “Wonderful. Better than Mama,”
at the end of this round.
“Okay, you do this step,” says Sierra, handing the
remote to Stephen, and then sitting back on the
couch to watch. She reads the instructions aloud:
“Bake in the oven: Twist the Wii Remote while
holding the A Button to adjust the oven. Watch the
meter carefully. When it reaches the red part, switch
it off.” Sierra leaps up, gasps as she covers her
mouth with both hands in dramatic support of her
brother accurately adjusting the oven, which takes
just 6 seconds. She sits back down on the couch in
relief. Even though Sierra has played several, much
longer steps in assembling their cream puffs,
Stephen hands the remote back to his sister
when he completes this one.
For the next task, Sierra has to slice the tops off
of 5 cream puffs. “Knife,” observes Stephen.
“Can I help you kill with?” He giggles.
“I’m not killing them, Stephen.” Sierra is not as
amused.
“Well you’re killing right now with a knife,” he
points out.
adding ingredients to the cream, stirring then
stewing it and, finally, filling the puffs.
Sierra corrects him, “That’s not killing. That’s cutting.”
She enunciates the “tt” in “cutting,” speaking in an
adult-like tone.
By now it’s almost 8:00, and they’ve been on the
Wii for nearly 20 minutes. Sierra reaches for the
remote. Stephen yanks it out of her reach and
instead twirls it around his wrist by its cord. Sierra
grasps for it again, this time screaming, “Stephen,
you might break it! That costs $50!” She is only
half-serious and half-amused by her own comment.
Instead of taking the remote, she stands up to get
the Wii Sports cartridge out of the basket and then
walks over to the TV to replace Cooking Mama
with the game she promised her brother they’d
play next.
“Yah, I’m cutting till I’m bleeding,” Stephen snickers.
“I’m cutting my finger off.” Sierra continues to slice,
unfazed, and so he leans backward, raises his feet,
and gently kicks Sierra in the head. Stephen laughs
as his sister simply brushes him away with her
spare hand. Sierra ends up earning an “Excellent!
Better than Mama!” rating for her slicing skills, for
which Stephen squeezes her around the shoulder
in a quick side hug.
“Okay, my turn. It’s my turn,” asserts Stephen. “My
turn. Sierra, it’s my turn!” She ignores Stephen as
she reads the instructions to separate eggs for the
cream filling, mouthing the words silently.
“Mom!” whines Stephen, “It’s my turn. Tell Sierra
it’s my turn.”
Sierra negotiates before their mother has a chance
to intervene. “Listen,” she says, turning to face her
brother, “if you let me do this now, we can do boxing
next.” This silences Stephen, who flashes a grin of
approval.
When Stephen sees what she is doing, he jumps
up, runs to meet his sister at the TV set, pauses,
and then runs back to the couch, where he
somersaults into a headstand against its seatback.
He’s excited about the prospect of boxing against
his sister instead of just tag teaming her in
Cooking Mama. Sierra and Stephen work up a
serious sweat until about 8:15, when their father
joins them to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Sierra lets the guys compete — TMNT isn’t her
thing — while she plays with her Polly Pockets,
half-watching them from the sidelines.
“This one’s pretty hard,” says Sierra, moving her
upper body as though to coax the yolk to land safely
inside the other egg shell, and dancing her feet
around to provide better balance for her torso’s
movements. She cheers when the yolk makes it,
and squeaks when it falls short and onto the floor.
Stephen, too, is rapt with the difficulty of this
challenge.
Stephen reads the on-screen assessment of Sierra’s
performance encouragingly: “‘Not bad. I will help
you.’” Sierra hands her brother the remote. The
siblings keep up this mixture of mild cheerleading,
jockeying for a turn, bickering, and playful teasing
for the final four steps of cream puff production:
37
Parent attitudes towards and rules around
technology
As much as Steven enjoys playing TMNT with his
son, he hasn’t given up his own gaming interests.
In fact, he recently bought himself the Wii version
of Call of Duty, a notoriously violent videogame.
For the most part, Steven tries “to keep [Stephen]
away from that game. There’s a lot of blood. There’s
a lot of shooting and stuff.” But he doesn’t prevent
little Stephen from playing a game or two with
him either. According to Aracely, “I think it kind
of bores him because he’s not familiar with the
characters. So it works itself out. I mean, he’s
allowed to play. He chooses not to, which is great.”
In general, Aracely and Steven do not censor
media content that enters their home. Instead,
Anything having to do with television and
shows we’re sure to let them know that they’re
actors. […] Just because, I mean, we watch
everything, you know, and it’s not a problem. I
mean, I take them to movies and I take them to
grown-up movies and they’re totally fine with
it. And there’s not really like an age thing for
them. I mean, they can’t watch horror movies is
only because they’ll have nightmares, and
they’re not there yet, which is fine because I
don’t like them. But […] they’ve walked into the
Sopranos like the worst parts and I’m like
[inaudible]. So, I mean, it’s just little things that
we just have make sure that they know that
they’re actors. That’s their jobs, and it’s not real.
And I just don’t want them to pick something
up and, you know, reenact it somewhere else.
That’s our only concern.
Steven’s parents brought him up similarly in that
“there was no limitation.” He says his father and
mother — Claudia Guzman, Gabriela’s mom —
let him and his two brothers watch whatever they
liked and play video games of their choosing.
But his parents didn’t openly discuss potentially
disturbing or age-inappropriate content with him
and his brothers the way he and Aracely do with
Sierra and Stephen.
Steven and Aracely also don’t feel the need to
limit their kids’ screen time. With their busy
afterschool and weekend agendas, the kids aren’t
home for long enough to zone out in front of the
38
computer or TV for extended stretches. “They
kind of tell themselves when they’re over it,”
Aracely told us.
But the Ramirez’s leniency over Sierra and Stephen’s
media use is, by no means, a reflection of apathy
or neglect. Although Steven and Aracely let their
kids surf the Web freely — parental controls aren’t
set on the family computers — they keep an eye
on what they’re doing online, and expressed one
concern about their safety:
Aracely: I worry about predators.
Steven: I always get weird.... What if there’s
some weirdo on [Club Penguin]?
Interviewer: Right, ‘cause you don’t really
know that they’re all kids on there.
Steven: Yah, exactly. And you know, for
example, her sister’s on there, you know,
she’s 32 years old!
Steven frequently looks over Sierra and Stephen’s
shoulders when they’re on the laptop, offering his
guidance — often unsolicited—on an as-needed
basis. And “they always run to me and ask me about
the laptop.” While Sierra calls on her brother to
help her out with Club Penguin or the Internet,
“my dad shows me like what to do. So that I don’t
like break it and stuff.”
Sierra and Stephen are occasionally teachers, too.
Big Steven’s “dad comes over and sees the kids on
the laptop and he doesn’t know how to use the
computer. And he’s just like amazed by it. He’s all,
‘Wow, they all use the computer?’ It motivates him
to want go out there.” The kids have also shown
Aracely’s mother the ropes because “she’s never
really been on the computer,” explained Sierra,
“So we let her like have a turn and like teach her
how to go on it and stuff.”
synthesis: new media and the
modern family
Though related by blood and separated by just a 20-minute
drive, the Ramirezes and the Guzmans hold notably different
relationships with technology. For the Ramirezes, technology
is and has always been seamlessly woven into the fabric of
family life. The Guzmans, on the other hand, are integrating
newer technologies into longstanding family values and
routines one step at a time. The point of comparing the
Guzmans and the Ramirezes is not to generalize parenting
practices to particular family characteristics. Rather, by
examining findings from the large-scale survey in the specific
context of these two households, we’ve been able to surface
insights valuable to the design of media and environments that
support family learning. Here we present what we believe to
be the key discoveries of this investigation:
40
Forget facebook — the power of real
social networks
Two-thirds of parents may restrict social
networking sites like MySpace and Facebook
for fear of what they might expose their kids to.
But parents may wish to channel some of that
attention to networks at home, school, and in
the neighborhood. When children reach school
age, classmates begin alerting them to the coolest
new websites and the best TV shows. This is how
Gabriela first learned about the Internet, and
why she subsequently asked her parents for help
getting onto DisneyChannel.com. Older family
members are often eager to introduce younger
ones to the digital media world and, if employed
— like Gabriela’s adult brother Devon and cousin
David — are capable of purchasing gadgets and
games as gifts. Gabriela’s father prohibits video
games, but she still plays them on the Nintendo
DS Devon gave her for Christmas, upstairs in her
bedroom, in the backseat of the car, but always out
of Hector’s sight. For every parent who believes he
can protect his child from sex and violence by
banning certain media from the home, there is
quite possibly another family member letting
this content in through the back door.
Not that this is always a bad thing. Digital media
offer opportunities to practice communicating and
collaborating with friends and family members, a
benefit acknowledged by 57% of the parents we
surveyed. Devon is responsible for signing Stephen
and Gabriela up for their trial Club Penguin (CP)
accounts. Now Sierra, Stephen, cousin Deirdre, and
Aunt Lisa are all working toward the common
goal of winning Stephen’s penguin enough
coins to furnish its swanky igloo. Few such family
enterprises exist in modern family life 9, providing
occasion for ongoing cooperation and conversation.
Gabriela also participates in this network via
Stephen, and while she finds the CP mini-games
amusing enough, it’s the cultural capital that comes
with being a CP subscriber that’s got her hooked:
trading high scores with classmate Pilar, and
showing next-door neighbor Ashley the Club
Penguin ropes after encouraging her to sign up.
Careful coordination in real time and space is
often required to set up these virtual networks
— such as when Gabriela and Ashley pinpointed
9
the exact posts in their apartments to keep within
each other’s DS transmission range — and can
deepen relationships between co-conspirators.
Scholarship on personal social networks of the
technologically unmediated variety dates back a
few decades, but the developmental implications
of this work are as relevant today as ever. Cochran
and Brassard (1979) note how the people in parents’
networks both directly and indirectly influence
the cognitive and social growth of young children
by serving as role models (as Uncle Devon models
technical know-how to Stephen and Sierra) or
active participants in network activities (as
Aunt Lisa helps earn coins in Club Penguin play).
And while Sierra’s grandparents have very little
experience with technology, as willing learners,
they provide her and Stephen with opportunities
to teach them how to operate the computer and
search the Internet. This reversal of roles from
traditional grandparent-young child teaching
interactions is increasingly common in technologyrich households, and of “the sophisticated set of
reciprocal exchange skills [that] will, in turn, play
an important role in preparing the developing
individual to build the network relationships which
will be supportive of productive functioning later
in life” (Cochran & Brassard, 1979, p. 606).
Go outside and play with your friends
Social networks of the unmediated variety may
be as influential as ever, but new technologies
are expanding children’s virtual social networks
beyond relatives, neighbors, and local community.
Researchers are still exploring the developmental
implications of online virtual worlds and social
networking sites for young visitors (see Subrahmanyam, 2009); meanwhile, parents are concerned.
Hector doesn’t like how Club Penguin keeps Gabriela
alone, inside:
When we were growing up, the thing was, you
know, go to school, come back, do you homework,
and go out there and play, be with your friends
and interact with people more than sitting in
front of a monitor and three, four hours later,
you know, they’re still focused on it. And that’s
something we don’t want her to do.
Girl School Cookie sales drives and sports team fundraisers are notable exceptions, but they are often seasonal or temporary and
both require membership in specialized communities.
41
The Guzmans aren’t alone: 41% of parents think
that time spent with media supplants time kids
should be spending with friends and family.
An even greater number of parents — 59% of
those surveyed — believe digital-age pastimes are
keeping their kids from getting enough exercise.
Concerns over exercise and fresh air relate to
a more general desire expressed by both sets
of parents to raise well-rounded individuals.
Accordingly, the Ramirezes have packed their
kids’ afterschool schedules with ballet, harmonica,
and soccer. The Guzmans are taking a different
approach, placing limits on Gabriela’s media
use and setting rules that prioritize family and
friends over alone time on the computer.
A majority of the parents we surveyed believe
in these displacement effects, but a minority —
only 18% — indicated that their own children
spend too much time with technology. Why the
apparent paradox? While there is a body of
research indicating that parents often believe
their own children to be more immune to the
negative effects of media than other people’s
(e.g., Livingstone & Helsper, 2007; Meirick, Sims,
Gilchrist, & Croucher, 2009)—also known as
“third-person effects” (Davison, 1983)—they may
also be unaware of just how much media their
kids are consuming. Laptop computers, iPods, and
Nintendo DSes tend to be used in the outer reaches
of the home, and are less typically positioned the
way TV sets are, in a family or living room where
parents can see when and what their children are
watching, and for how long. It’s also easier for parents
to allow their kids to watch just one hour of TV
after school — the way Claudia Guzman does
— because TV programs come neatly packaged
in 30- or 60-minute episodes that way. Trolling
around Club Penguin, texting a friend, and surfing
the Web, on the other hand, have no clear end
markers; kids can keep at these activities forever.
And the computer your child says they’re doing
their homework on is the same computer they
use to instant message friends and watch YouTube videos. It’s become increasingly difficult to
keep an eye on the when, what, and for how long
with these newer platforms.
The Guzman case offers another hypothesis for
why fewer than 1 in 5 parents think their kids
consume too much media: While Hector and
Claudia worry about Gabriela’s privacy, personal
relationships, and outdoor time, thanks to the
rules and restrictions they’ve set up around her
media use, they don’t believe she’s in immediate
danger of getting “sucked into the television or
sucked into the videogames or sucked into the
computer.” The Guzmans have managed to keep
these threats at bay by managing her schedule
and activities, though they realize they might
lose some of this control as she grows older, more
curious, and independent. Their hunch is probably
correct, at least according to Carlson et al. (2010),
who found that children whose parents set limits
on screen time spent less time with media than
children whose parents didn’t.
Platform perceptions
Hector and Claudia don’t mind that Gabriela owns
MP3 and MP4 players, and even gave the 8-year-old
her very own cell phone. And while they encourage
Gabriela to be proficient on the PC, video games
are off limits; at least the console variety, since
her parents say it’s okay to play Club Penguin
mini-games online.
Not all digital platforms are created equal in the
eyes of the parents we surveyed either. Computerbased activities (other than surfing the Internet)
rated highest among devices as good for kids,
but a surprising majority of parents think video
games develop skills important to school success.
Mobile phones are the platform viewed as least
valuable for young children’s learning, and the
one most prohibited for kids in this age set.
Non-cellular mobile devices such as handheld
gaming consoles and MP3 players, on the other
hand, are much more accepted. And parents
are split on their feelings toward the Internet:
they appreciate the access it gives their kids to
information but fear the access it gives strangers
to their kids.
For the most part, these perceptions are based on
parents’ vague understandings of what their kids
should be doing with digital media at certain ages.
42
They may think that for a 7-year-old, playing video
games on a cell phone is more appropriate than
texting friends on one, or feel that visiting a
kid-targeted virtual world like Webkinz is less
risky than visiting a chat room or MySpace. As
these examples illustrate, certain platforms can
provide access to activities that are both more
and less suitable for young kids. But when the
lines are this blurred, how can parents make
wise decisions about their children’s digital
media practices?
What is developmentally appropriate?
As the previous section suggests, there is a need
to clarify what it means for a product, platform,
or activity to be developmentally appropriate. For
the practical purposes of this report — which is to
inform researchers and practitioners in creating
high-quality digital media experiences for families
— we subscribe to the ecologically minded
definition proposed by the National Association
for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC),
which considers:
1. What is known about child development as
it relates to age-related characteristics and
capabilities
2. What is known about each child as an individual
3. What is known about the social and cultural
contexts in which children live (e.g., values,
expectations, behavioral and linguistic conventions) (NAEYC, 2009)
We’ve all heard of the 9-year-old bloggers and
prodigy filmmakers whose videos get thousands
of hits on YouTube. But only a minority of youth is
producing content at this level of sophistication
(Ito et al., 2009; Lenhart & Madden, 2005) despite
frequent media characterizations of an entire
generation of digital whiz kids. Perhaps it’s okay
that Sierra isn’t a budding moviemaker, or that
Gabriela hasn’t posted her autobiography to the
blogosphere. They are, after all, just 7- and
8-year-olds. In fact, Sierra admitted to liking
her Barbies better than the digital diversions her
9-year-old brother couldn’t get enough of. She
was an early 7 when we first met her, just shy of
the magical age of 8, when kids’ digital media
use picks up (Gutnick et al., 2011), and when
children’s brains are more capable of dealing
with representational worlds (Piaget, 1964).
Cognitive readiness aside, is it realistic to expect
children this age to participate in the artistic
expression and civic engagement activities that
proponents of digital media (e.g., Jenkins et al.,
2006; Ito et al., 2009) say these tools support? Are
there developmental reasons to postpone these
expectations until adolescence, when the user
interface of sophisticated programs like iMovie
and WordPress will make more sense, when
parents are more willing to allow their children
to participate in online communities, and when
youth have developed better judgment about
content, audience, and online safety?
Creative expression and civic engagement using
digital media may be the eventual goal, but
technology holds a different set of opportunities
for the developing young child than it does for
teenagers. Before youth can effectively participate
in online communities comprising diverse
populations and perspectives, they must first
learn how to effectively communicate with the
flesh-and-blood members of their own families
and other local networks. Many parents believe
that it’s more appropriate for 8-year-olds to play
outside with their friends, siblings, and pets, and
develop physical coordination and motor skills
with tangible objects, rather than with virtual
ones inside.
In short, digital media that is developmentally
appropriate should be responsive to the age of
the child, individual readiness, and what family
and local communities believe to be appropriate.
Parent media preferences
Big Steven grew up on Nintendo gaming systems
and now plays the Wii with Sierra and Stephen.
He generally reserves the mature titles to play by
himself or with his adult friends, but occasionally
lets his son join him in a game of Call of Duty.
Aracely, who’s all for the father-son bonding,
prefers to watch TMNT and Wii Sports matches
from the sidelines. Claudia rarely and Hector
never plays Club Penguin with Gabriela, which
43
means she mostly plays alone and sometimes
with the neighbors. Like most of our survey
respondents, Gabriela and Sierra’s parents are
more likely to spend time consuming old media
like TV and movies with their kids than newer
media like video games and the Internet. It’s also
noteworthy that the media activities parents
reported doing most with their children — watching
TV (89%), reading books (79%), and playing board
games (73%) — aligned with reports of what they
enjoy doing most with them (41%, 23%, 18%,
respectively). In other words, parents aren’t
participating in media activities that they
themselves don’t take pleasure in.
The after-school TV show that Claudia most enjoys
watching with Gabriela and Dora is Sabrina the
Teenage Witch, reminiscent of the 1960s sitcom
Bewitched. She likes the frequent celebrity cameos,
especially when it’s Dick Van Dyke, a TV star from
her own childhood. When the girls switch to
cartoons or tween programs on Nickelodeon or
Disney, Claudia often leaves to start dinner or tidy
up the house. At night, the whole family watches
the Discovery Channel and sitcoms on network TV,
shows that everyone in the room finds entertaining.
For the Guzmans, TV is together time, and regularly
scheduled programs structure their before- and
after-dinner routines. In the Ramirez home, Steven
and Stephen bond over the Wii version of the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a property that first
gained popularity in the late 1980s, when Steven
was about his son’s age. In both families, media
content has to have some amount of adult appeal
to get parents viewing and playing with their kids.
The case study kids, on the other hand, aren’t
as picky as their parents. As long as an activity
provides opportunities to connect more closely
with one of them, they’re happy to participate.
Gabriela, for instance, eagerly piloted the Microsoft
tutorials Claudia designed for her adult ed course.
And though the mature subject matter of Call of
Duty “bores him,” according to Aracely, Stephen
still embraces any opportunity to play video games
with his dad, TMNT or not. Come adolescence,
this willingness to participate in adult-oriented
activities with their parents will surely dissipate.
Parents should enjoy it while it lasts.
44
No two families alike
Gabriela and her mother bond over Word and
Excel, but no TV set in the bedroom, and never
video games in front of Dad. Sierra and Stephen, on
the other hand, can pretty much watch whatever
and whenever they want on the set in their room.
They also play the Wii with big Steven, sometimes
even violent ones. The Ramirezes and Guzmans
live in the same city, share the same ethnic
heritage, and exhibit equal devotion to the LA
Dodgers. So what can explain their different
childrearing styles around media?
Some studies have shown household income to
predict parental mediation styles (e.g., Carlson et al.,
2010; Warren, 2005), while others have demonstrated
parent education to be the determining factor
(e.g., Valkenburg et al., 1999). Our own survey
has shown that older parents are more likely to
set rules around their kids’ technology use than
younger parents are. But the ecological analysis of
the Guzman and Ramirez families paints a more
complex picture of how parents are raising their
children in a technology age. They’re granting
access, setting rules, and either playing or
instructing in reaction to forces both great
and small. Here we illustrate how experiential
(microsystem), institutional (exosystem), and
cultural (macrosystem) factors are shaping family
engagement with digital media in these two
particular homes.
Personal experience
Hector and Claudia Guzman, now in their late
40s, spent their childhoods outside playing street
baseball with the neighborhood kids. Times have
changed, of course, and while they would never
allow Gabriela to leave the apartment grounds
unattended, they’d prefer that she play outside
with the girls across the courtyard rather than with
other Club Penguin players online. But Steven and
Aracely Ramirez, who are both around age 30, spent
much of their childhoods indoors watching TV,
surfing the Internet and, in Steven’s case, playing
video games. By their own estimation, they turned
out just fine, which may explain why they let their
kids make their own media choices. Tapscott (2009)
says that this is a generation-wide phenomenon:
older parents that are less familiar with and more
suspicious of their kids’ digital pastimes restrict
more than “Net Gener” (those born after 1977)
parents do. McPake and Plowman (2009) would
argue that personal histories — not age, per se
— is the mediating factor here. They posit that
parents often hold a romanticized view of their
own technology-free childhoods and want their
kids to experience the same. Parents also hold other
histories that can powerfully shape childrearing
practices around media, such as raising older
siblings, and having to learn to operate new
technologies for the first time. Recall Claudia’s
experience learning to use a computer with help
from her three sons. It was scary at first, but led to
greater job security in the end. Now she’s teaching
her daughter Microsoft Word, Excel, and other
technical skills that she believes are essential
in today’s work world.
Institutional
Examination of institutional structures (e.g.,
parents’ work, mass media, school system) that
influence what goes on in a child’s immediate
surroundings can provide further insight into
the Ramirez and Guzmans’ mediation behaviors.
Aracely and Stephen both work full-time, which
means that they’re not always around to monitor
their kids’ digital activities the way that Claudia
is able to when she’s at home with Gabriela after
school. Moreover, after their busy, extended days
at the office, Aracely and Steven want a little
downtime when they get home from work, and
the TV set in the kids’ bedroom is “a really good
sitter.” This may also explain why they let Stephen
and Sierra “kick off their shoes” and do what they
want following an activity-packed afternoon at
the community center they attend until their
parents get home at night. Work-related forces
also explain how Gabriela wound up with a cell
phone, despite her father’s otherwise Luddite
inclinations. Because Hector works for a mobile
communications provider, he was in a position to
give the 8-year-old her mother’s old phone at no
financial expense. Another exosystem factor —
a household income that supports the ownership
of just one car — has made Gabriela and her
phone instrumental actors in coordinating the
family carpool and other errands.
Cultural
Hector and Claudia cherish weekend ball games
and picnics at the park with friends and family,
like many second-generation Mexican-American
families living in the eastern neighborhoods of
Los Angeles. Their desire to raise Gabriela to fully
participate in family events and in this cultural
community — a desire shared among many
Mexican-American parents (Delgado & Ford,
1998; Okagaki & Sternberg, 1993)—may further
encourage her to go outside and limit screen time
indoors. Macrosystem factors can also explain
within-family differences in mediation styles.
Gabriela isn’t allowed to play video games, but
Steven Ramirez, Claudia’s oldest son from a
previous marriage, claims he grew up playing
video games and that his mom never restricted
him and his two brothers from watching R-rated
movies. Perhaps broader societal views on what’s
appropriate for young girls to play and watch can
explain Claudia’s double standard.
Through this brief analysis, we can see how the
intricacies of individual families make it nearly
impossible to attribute different mediation styles
to demographics alone. A macrosystem factor
like gender may influence how the Guzmans are
raising their daughter around technology, but for
the family that lives in the apartment next door,
a more localized factor like birth order could
explain why parents restrict one sibling’s media
practices more than another’s. With so many
influences operating at so many levels of the
family ecology — not to mention the ever-evolving
stream of technologies entering the home — is it
possible to raise children today on anything but a
case-by-case basis?
45
recommendations
Taken together, the survey findings and case studies paint a
portrait of the modern family media ecology today. Next, we
offer a set of recommendations to researchers, children’s
media producers, and others interested in improving family
engagement with digital media in ways that support children’s
healthy development.
46
research recommendations
Map children’s development to new platforms
Much of the television research conducted in
the 1970s through ‘90s examined how children’s
developmental capacities (e.g., attention, symbolic
thinking) interfaced with the content or formal
features of television programs. For instance,
researchers determined that children under the
age of 4 have difficulty distinguishing between
reality and the events depicted on television (e.g.,
Flavell, Flavell, Green, & Korfmacher, 1990; Nikken
& Peeters, 1988), and distinguishing between
commercials and TV programs (e.g., Levin, Petros,
& Petrella, 1982). Singer (1980) found that the salient
features of TV shows such as rapid character action,
sound effects, and special camera techniques
effectively held children’s attention. The insights
uncovered by these types of studies were then
used to create more developmentally appropriate
programming for children, and protect younger,
more vulnerable viewers from the potentially
negative effects of television viewing.
Children today have access to a much wider array
of media platforms, many originally designed for
adult use. Just as researchers did for television,
the formal and content features of these newer
platforms need to be mapped to children’s
developing cognitive, social, and now even motor
and visual capacities, given the availability of
gesture-based (e.g., Wii, PlayStation Move, Kinect)
and 3D (e.g., PS3, Nintendo 3DS) gaming systems.
Interactivity adds a layer of complexity to the
representational experience of digital media;
how might controlling one’s movement through
a virtual world, for instance, facilitate (or impede)
symbolic understandings? Or how might a child’s
conceptual understanding of the Internet make
her more or less effective at searching? Knowledge
yielded by this type of research would be valuable
to producers interested in scaffolding new
technologies to meet the developmental needs
of younger users, and to everyone else interested
in knowing just “how young is too young?” for
each type of platform.
And yet before the advent of Logo10, who would
have thought that preschoolers could learn to
10
program — turtle robots or otherwise? Seymour
Papert and his followers have done much to
challenge established notions of how young is too
young for computational thinking (see Papert,
1980), and have even managed to situate Logo
programming activities in the commercially
successful LEGO Mindstorms toy robotics kits. Other
researchers have furthered our understandings of
how new technologies can boost young users to
engage in more sophisticated levels of cognition
than possible when unassisted by these tools
(Pea, 1993). Simulations, for instance, can help
deepen children’s conceptual understandings by
visualizing the objects and relationships missing
from their mental models (see Kozma, 1991).
New research should investigate how the more
advanced visualizations and representations
available today, coupled with emerging technosocial configurations (multiplayer games, social
networking tools, mobile devices), can further
expand the limits of children’s cognitive and
social capabilities.
Over the past two decades, millions of dollars and
countless hours have been invested in studying
video games as learning environments. This body
of research, along with the fact that a growing
proportion of adults grew up with gaming systems,
may explain why 69% of the parents we surveyed
believe certain video games can develop academic
skills. Techno-enthusiasts now claim that mobile
devices hold as much potential to transform
learning, but parents are skeptical: when asked
which tech activity holds the most potential for
learning, only 1% chose mobile devices. While
there is certainly a growing number of researchers
and developers investigating mobile learning
(e.g., Chiong & Shuler, 2010), we have yet to amass
the research base necessary to alter parents’
perceptions about mobile devices as well as
virtual worlds, social networking sites, and other
emerging platforms.
Investigate the new coviewing
The social dimension of media engagement is
as important as the more cognitive processes
described above. And with the proliferation of
newer platforms in homes, there has been a
Logo is a computer programming language developed for educational use in 1967 by Seymour Papert and Wally Feurzeig, based in
part on Piaget’s theories of development.
47
resurgence of interest in the research community
in coviewing. The LIFE Center11 recently coined
the term joint media engagement (JME) to extend
the notion of coviewing beyond television, and
to more broadly describe what happens when
people learn together with media. JME refers to
“spontaneous and designed experiences of people
using media together, and can happen anywhere
and at any time when there are multiple people
interacting together with media. Modes include
viewing, playing, searching, reading, contributing,
and creating, with either digital or traditional
media” (Stevens & Penuel, 2010).
The LIFE Center’s research has shown that JME is
a crucial mechanism for getting social learning off
the ground, before formal instruction is possible.
This work has drawn attention to the important
roles parents, grandparents, siblings, and teachers
play in supporting learning, both at home (Barron
et al., 2009) and at school (Penuel et al., 2009).
However, more research is needed to identify the
cultural, economic, and design factors that both
foster and inhibit family engagement with digital
media. How might the affordances of certain platforms (e.g., mobility, connectivity, asynchronicity)
be used to overcome these barriers? What about
children who don’t have access to social supports
at home — can new tools be designed to scaffold
learning with media in the absence of adults
or more capable peers? And which research and
design methods should be employed to investigate
these questions?
Study sibling engagement with media
Analyses in this report have focused on parentchild media engagement, but the Sibling Chefs
vignette (see page 36) portrays brother and
sister as learning partners in digital media play.
Siblings are more natural playmates than parents
and children are and, if close enough in age, likely
to share play preferences. Sierra and Stephen’s
cooking antics have us asking: Who’s in control
during the game? Who’s teaching whom? How
do gender and age differences between players
affect play patterns? And how might parental
interventions mediate learning opportunities?
Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy’s (2008) naturalistic
studies of siblings and friends playing video games
together at home examined interactions similar
Create a children’s media research commons
Although some commercial media producers
map players’ developmental capacities to new
platforms in formative studies, very few reveal
their findings to the broader children’s media
community. There are, however, a few notable
exceptions. Bryant, Akerman, and Drell (2008; 2010)
have published research conducted for Nickelodeon
charting features of the Nintendo Wii and DS
gaming platforms to preschooler’s developmental
capabilities. Non-profit media organizations like
Sesame Workshop and government-supported
initiatives such as those funded by the U.S.
Department of Education’s Ready To Learn
program12 do release findings from their research
and development work on a regular basis (e.g.,
Chiong & Shuler, 2010; Penuel et al., 2009). But
these efforts to share are scattered and, as such,
often evade producers’ awareness. Children’s media
companies, with assistance from professional
associations (e.g., NAEYC, AAP), children’s advocacy
organizations (e.g., Common Sense Media, Children
Now), and government agencies (e.g., Bureau of
Labor Statistics, National Center for Education
Statistics) should set up and contribute to a crosssector clearinghouse that can catalog such research.
Producers may find contributing to a children’s media
research commons to be more efficient than keeping
findings to themselves for competitive reasons.
LIFE, which stands for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments, is a multi-institution NSF Science of Learning Center hosted at the
University of Washington in partnership with Stanford University and SRI.
12
See pbskids.org/read/about/rtl-grant.html
11
48
to those observed between Sierra and her brother.
Their analyses highlight the spontaneous instances
of teaching and learning that players set up among
themselves during gaming sessions. Sibling
engagement on other platforms — i.e., e-books,
Internet search tools, social networking sites,
virtual worlds, and mobile devices—is an area
of inquiry needing investigators’ attention.
industry recommendations
Our cross-study analysis has underscored the
need for children’s media producers to pay closer
attention to two dynamic, intersecting systems:
(a) the changing needs, capabilities, and interests
of children as they grow, and (b) the family and
larger ecological system in which this growth
takes place. Here we offer specific suggestions on
how to acknowledge these systems in the design
of new products.
Create developmentally appropriate digital
experiences
Acknowledge and promote developmental
pathways of digital media engagement…
There are four basic ways in which young people
interact with digital media. They
1. consume content (e.g., play a video game, read
a website, watch a video on YouTube)
2. produce content (e.g., write a story on Microsoft
Word, film a movie)
3. share content (e.g., post a comment to a blog or
a movie to YouTube)
4. communicate, cooperate, and coordinate with
others, either
a. people they know in person (text a friend), or
b. virtual acquaintances (chat on Club Penguin)
Interactions 1 through 3 are numbered in
order of how children typically develop these
capabilities through both digital and non-digital
play. Communication skills develop in tandem
with consuming, producing, and sharing, but
face-to-face interaction precedes interaction with
strangers. By designing with these developmental
pathways in mind, producers are more likely to
create experiences that sufficiently support and
challenge children’s cognitive capabilities, while
also meeting the approval of parents concerned
about their social and physical growth.
…but leverage the power of technology to
enhance learning
Producers of high-quality media for young
children are already familiar with Piaget’s stages
of cognitive development, but as new digital tools
and representations enable children to perform
13
cognitive tasks once thought well beyond their
developmental capabilities, these stages may
need to be reevaluated for a modern era. While
designing down — scaffolding new technologies to
meet the developmental needs of young users
— is important, producers should also design up:
too many virtual worlds and video games created
today for young users target the lowest common
denominator of player ability. Producers should
leverage powerful tools and visualizations inside of
these play environments to extend players’ zones
of proximal development13 and, consequently,
accelerate and deepen learning.
Make screen time family time
Adolescents use digital media to express identities
separate from their families and connect more
closely with peers (Ito et al., 2009), but as seen
in the case studies, younger children still enjoy
spending time with their parents. Producers
should therefore create tools and content that
leverage this mutual desire for connection while it
lasts, inserting opportunities for learning to occur
in the process of play and exchange. Hitting the
sweet spot of middle childhood is key: a video game
designed for parents to play with their 6-year-olds,
for instance, is far more likely to engage both
players — and meet commercial success —
than one targeting teens and their parents.
Design with the full ecology of the child
in mind
Most producers of children’s media are tuned
into the interactions between player and platform,
but few pay sufficient attention to the exosystem
(institutional) and macrosystem (cultural) factors
that invariably shape these microsystem interactions
(see again Figure 1 on page 16). Since parents,
relatives, and educators are gatekeepers of
children’s digital experiences, producers should
recognize them as equally important audiences
in their designs. Producers should ask:
r How will this product align with the intended
audience’s values and beliefs?
r How will it fit into family routines around work,
leisure, daycare, and communicating?
r Will members of the target population be able
to afford it?
A concept developed by Lev Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is the difference between what a learner can do alone and
what she can do with the help of more capable others or, as discussed here, technological tools (Vygotsky, 1978).
49
Producers should also look for learning
opportunities to be found at the mesosystem, or
in the connections between the various settings
children frequent. Producers should ask:
r How might the learning and fun inspired by this
product carry over to other settings in a child’s life?
How might interests sparked in other settings
be deepened and sustained through the child’s
use of this product?
r What technological, social, and/or institutional
supports are required to facilitate this bridging
of experience between settings?
r
Here are some specific suggestions to guide
producers on designing with the full ecology
of the developing child in mind:
Create video games that appeal to kids and
parents alike
Research on television coviewing suggests that
children learn more from educational shows
when parents watch with them (e.g., Salomon,
1977). If the coviewing effect holds true with
learning games, then producers need to work on
creating experiences that appeal to both parents
and children, just as the producers of Sesame
Street intentionally write adult humor into the
show to encourage parents to watch with their
preschoolers. Unlike TV shows, movies, and DVDs
with broad audience appeal, video games tend to
satisfy either young or mature audiences, but rarely
both. What would such a video game look like?
Would it accommodate face-to-face interactions
— as the Ramirez family’s beloved board games
do — rather than shoulder-to-shoulder player
orientations? More R&D work is needed to extract
design principles for effective co-learning games.
networks might be similar in spirit to the Ramirezes’
Club Penguin account, but also allow players to
master topics that connect to what they might
be learning in school.
Think outside the (X)Box
Create media-based experiences that transcend
the living room and take kids outside, and make
use of multiple platforms to connect participants
and drive activity. Most major media companies
have discovered the power of transmedia storytelling
in steering young consumers from TV to the Internet
and back again. But too few are including in the
cycle good, old-fashioned books, the medium that
parents most enjoy sharing with their young
children and still the best way to develop their
early literacy skills. In these ways, technology can
be used to engage children in the very activities —
socializing, physical exercise, academic pursuits,
and imaginative play — that adults fear digital
media are displacing from children’s lives.
Anytime, anywhere learning
Today, with the falling costs of mobile devices,
even the youngest of children can carry a screen
around in their pocket for the entirety of their
waking hours. Mobile devices can also enhance
networked play and learning by allowing kids to
take the necessary hardware outside, and from
home to school to grandma’s house and back
again for uninterrupted continuity of experience.
Producers should be cognizant of parents’
perceptions of cell phone use and ownership
among young children, however, and design
mobile experiences on non-cellular devices
such as Nintendo DSes and iPod touches so
that parents are willing let their kids play.
Design the guilt out of digital-age parenting
Foster family teamwork
Very young children can’t quite appreciate the
interconnectedness of online communities, so
design media that connect kids with people they
actually know. Include parents, siblings, neighbors,
and grandparents as coparticipants in goal-oriented
activities that foster collaboration and problem
solving. Digital media are often blamed for
displacing the time kids spend in face-to-face
conversation — so design experiences that require
flesh-and-blood partners to play. These real-virtual
50
What parent hasn’t used the TV, computer, or
video games to babysit? Though not ideal, it’s how
parents without a human sitter ever manage to
take showers, cook dinner, or catch a breath on a
daily basis. Pediatricians warn of the dangers of
too much screen time, and so parents feel bad
about what has become a ubiquitous practice.
Aracely is certainly among those laden with this
sense of guilt. Can new systems be designed that
let parents and other caregivers spend some of this
screen time with their children, even if they’re not in
the same room with them? We challenge producers
to imagine and build devices to go beyond the baby
monitor model, and let caregivers interactively
participate in media activities with their children,
whether one room or one thousand miles apart.
51
conclusion
As soon as Gabriela, Hector, and Claudia come to a satisfactory
resolution regarding the texting issue and equilibrium is
restored at home, the next new technological phenomenon
will knock it off kilter again. These cycles of disruption are
inevitable and occurring at an ever-faster rate. In fact, by
the time this report goes to press, the tools and diversions
described here — e.g., gaming, texting, and virtual worlds
— may have settled somewhat in our national psyche. In their
place, new tools and diversions will be disrupting dinnertimes,
making headlines, and altering family rhythms and routines.
Therefore, R&D professionals should not focus too closely
on particular platforms that may soon lose currency without
examining the larger systems in which these platforms
are being used. New platforms will come, some will stay,
and many will go. Families, schools, the workplace, faith
communities, personal social networks, and other institutions
52
are far more enduring. Aiming for alignment with these more
slowly evolving systems is critical to successfully designing
for children’s learning with digital media.
Most readers of this report will see beyond the immediate
threats emerging media pose to family life to the potential they
hold for learning and communication. Unlocking digital media’s
potential however, will demand a more robust national
conversation about the roles that families must play in guiding
their children to use the technological tools of their generation.
Our research concludes that engaging parents and other
family members in these roles will require considerable
new thinking by producers, the research community, and
policymakers. These efforts must account for the fact that
in an era of rapid change, families matter perhaps more than
ever in charting an exciting, dynamic pathway for every young
child’s success.
53
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appendix a:
the american academy of
pediatrics policy statement
on media education:
recommendations to pediatricians
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends the following:
1. Pediatricians need to become educated about the public health risks of media. Given the
impact that media have on the health of children and adolescents, AAP chapters and districts,
as well as medical schools and residency training programs, should ensure that ongoing
education in this area is a high priority
2. Pediatricians should ask at least 2 media-related questions at each well-child visit:
r How much entertainment media per day is the child or adolescent watching? The AAP
recommends that children have less than 2 hours of screen time per day.
r Is there a TV set or Internet access in the child’s or adolescent’s bedroom?
Children or teenagers who are showing aggressive behavior, have academic difficulties, or
are overweight or obese should have additional history taken. A recent study revealed that
office-based counseling regarding media is effective and could result in the parents of nearly
1 million additional children learning about the AAP recommendation to limit media time to
2 hours/day. Advice to parents should include the following:
+ Encourage a careful selection of programs to view.
+ Co-view and discuss content with children and adolescents.
+ Teach critical viewing skills.
+ Limit and focus time spent with media. In particular, parents young children and preteens
should avoid exposing them to PG-13 and R-rated movies.
+ Be good media role models; children often develop their media habits on the basis of their
parents’ media behavior.
+ Emphasize alternative activities.
+ Create an “electronic media-free” environment in children’s rooms.
+ Avoid use of media as an electronic baby-sitter.
3. Pediatricians should continue to urge parents to avoid TV and video-viewing for children
younger than 2 years. Increasing amounts of research have shown that infants and toddlers
have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other regular caregivers for healthy
brain growth. In addition, the results of 7 studies have shown that infants younger than 18
months who are exposed to TV may suffer from a delay in language development, and 1 study
revealed that infant videos may delay language development. No studies have documented a
benefit of early viewing.
4. Pediatricians should serve as role models for appropriate media use by limiting TV and video
use in waiting rooms and patients’ rooms, using educational materials to promote reading, and
having visits by volunteer readers in waiting rooms. Pediatricians should also offer in-office
reading programs, such as Reach Out and Read, and promote active play.
5. Schools need to begin implementing media education in their curricula. The simplest way to
do this would be to incorporate principles of media education into existing programs on drug
prevention and sex education.
6. Congress should consider mandating and funding universal media education in American schools.
7. The federal government and private foundations should dramatically increase their funding
of media research, particularly in the areas of media education, violence prevention, sex and
sexuality, drugs, obesity, and early brain development.
Source: American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media (2010)
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appendix b:
study methods
Case study selection and data collection
In addition to the selection criteria described on page 17, we intentionally chose children of about
age 8 because this seems to be when interest in and, consequently, time spent with digital media
increases (Gutnick et al., 2011). We decided to not include boys because masculine images of gamers
and hackers still dominate portrayals of the “digital native” (Prensky, 2001); there is more to learn
about girls’ relationships with technology. Finally, we chose to focus this research on what children
are doing outside of school, as kids in this age range spend most of their technology time at
home. Many public elementary schools in the U.S. today prohibit students from bringing cell
phones and other handheld electronics to campus, or allow them to visit the computer lab just
once a week.
We videotaped and took field notes during these observations, and photographed the settings
we visited plus relevant artifacts. The value of these observations is that they offered first-hand
glimpses of the case children’s early and, in some cases, very first interactions with particular
digital tools, yielding more accurate portrayals of early access and initial interest development
than interview data could alone. Of course, our home visits did not always coincide with the girls’
spontaneous use of technology and, in some cases, the girls and their parents set up special play
sessions with the intention of giving our cameras something of interest to capture. We are aware
of the extent to which our presence may have altered the families’ ordinary routines, but believe
that the activities themselves were minimally impacted by these scheduling adjustments.
Interviews were transcribed and videotapes logged and, together with our field notes and
photographs, were used to craft detailed narratives of each case study child. These narratives
serve as the basis for the Case Studies section of this report. Data sources were also coded for
pre-identified and emergent themes using HyperRESEARCH data analysis software. Through the
process of analytic induction (Znaniecki, 1934) and deduction, each theme was assessed for its
generality across the corpus of data and revised or dropped if counterexamples were found. Out
of this iterative exercise emerged a set of themes and a set of exemplifying instances, which serve
as the basis for the Synthesis section of this report.
Hotspex recruiting methods
Market research firm Hotspex invited select “panelists” to participate in the Parent Survey.
Respondents are initially recruited through email and online advertising campaigns, which direct
potential panelists to the Hotspex website. Candidates are then carefully screened to ensure that
they are not professional survey takers, and invited, when appropriate, to participate in a variety
of market research surveys commissioned by consumer product and other types of companies.
Hotspex panelists are rewarded for participating in surveys by a point system that can be used
to earn prizes and gift certificates, or make charitable donations. Visit http://www.hotspex.com
for more information.
Survey respondent demographics
Respondent population: 810 parents of children ages 3 through 10
Gender
Female 75.6%
Male 24.4%
U.S. region
Northeast: 20.1%
Midwest: 24.0%
South: 37.8%
West: 18.2%
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Child age
3-years-old: 10.3%
4-years-old: 14.2%
5-years-old: 11.9%
6-years-old: 17.4%
7-years-old: 13.1%
8-years-old: 10.3%
9-years-old: 13.0%
10-years-old: 9.9%
Parent’s highest level of
education
High school or less: 25.2%
Some college/trade/tech/
vocational training: 31.6%
College degree: 34.7%
Graduate degree: 8.5%
Annual household income
Less than $50,000: 44.5%
$50,000 - $99,999: 40.0%
More than $100,000: 11.6%
Rather not say: 3.9%
Ethnicity
White/Caucasian: 82.8%
Hispanic/Latino: 6.6%
Black/African-American: 4.6%
Asian/Pacific Islander: 2.8%
Native American: 1.4%
Mixed race: 1.2%
Rather not say: 0.5%
appendix c:
relevant articles and reports
Children, adolescents, and television (2001)
By the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Public Education
Pediatrics, 107(2)
http://www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/107/2/423
This statement describes the possible negative health effects of television viewing on children
and adolescents, such as violent or aggressive behavior, substance use, sexual activity, obesity,
poor body image, and decreased school performance. In addition to the television ratings system
and the v-chip (an electronic device that blocks programming), media education is an effective
approach to mitigating these potential problems. The American Academy of Pediatrics offers a
list of recommendations on this issue for pediatricians, parents, the federal government, and
the entertainment industry.
Policy statement - Media education (2010)
By the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media
Pediatrics, 126(5)
http://www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/126/5/1012
The American Academy of Pediatrics recognizes that exposure to mass media (e.g., television,
movies, video and computer games, the Internet, music lyrics and videos, newspapers, magazines,
books, advertising) presents health risks for children and adolescents but can provide benefits as
well. Media education has the potential to reduce the harmful effects of media and accentuate
the positive effects. By understanding and supporting media education, pediatricians can play
an important role in reducing harmful effects of media on children and adolescents.
Parents as learning partners in the development of technological fluency (2009)
By Brigid Barron, Caitlin Kennedy Martin, Lori Takeuchi, & Rachel Fithian
International Journal of Learning and Media, 1(2)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ijlm.2009.0021
This paper presents research on parent support of the development of new media skills and technological fluency. Parents’ roles in their children’s learning were identified based on interviews
with eight middle school students and their parents. All eight students were highly experienced
with technology activities. Seven distinct parental roles that supported learning were identified
and defined: Teacher, Collaborator, Learning Broker, Resource Provider, Nontechnical Consultant,
Employer, and Learner. The paper presents the approach used to identify these roles, the coding
system used, and examples of each role across the cases. The findings highlight the importance of
understanding family-based learning relationships when considering pathways to early expertise
with new media.
Toward an experimental ecology of human development (1977)
By Uri Bronfenbrenner
American Psychologist, 32(7)
A broader approach to research in human development is proposed that focuses on the progressive
accommodation, throughout the life span, between the growing human organism and the changing
environment in which it actually lives and grows. The latter include not only the immediate settings
containing the developing person but also the larger social contexts, both formal and informal,
in which these settings are embedded. In terms of method, the approach emphasizes the use of
rigorously designed experiments, both naturalistic and contrived, beginning in the early stages
of the research process. The changing relation between person and environment is conceived in
systems terms. These systems properties are set forth in a series of propositions, each illustrated
by concrete research examples.
59
Always connected: The new digital media habits of young children (2011)
By Aviva Gutnick, Michael Robb, Lori Takeuchi, & Jennifer Kotler, Sesame Workshop
http://joanganzcooneycenter.org/Reports-28.html
Today’s parents, academics, policymakers, and practitioners are scrambling to keep up with
the rapid expansion of media use by children and youth for ever larger portions of their waking
hours. This report by Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center takes a fresh look at
data emerging from studies undertaken by Sesame Workshop, independent scholars, foundations,
and market researchers on the media habits of young children who are often overlooked in a
public discourse that focuses on tweens and tweens. The report reviews seven recent studies
about young children and their ownership and use of media. By focusing on very young children
and analyzing multiple studies over time, the report arrives at a new, balanced portrait of
children’s media habits.
Hanging out, messing around, geeking out: Living and learning with new media (2009)
By Mizuko Ito, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Rachel Cody, Rebecca Herr-Stephenson,
et al., The Digital Youth Project
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report
Conventional wisdom about young people’s use of digital technology often equates generational
identity with technology identity: today’s teens seem constantly plugged in to video games,
social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the
intricate dynamics of youth’s social and recreational use of digital media. This book reports on an
ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning
with new media in varied settings — at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces.
By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, it views
the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends, but situated
within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that
frame the experience of youth in the United States.
Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth
through age 8: (2009)
By the National Association for the Education of Young Children
http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/position%20statement%20Web.pdf
The purpose of this position statement is to promote excellence in early childhood education by
providing a framework for best practice. Grounded in research on child development and learning
and in the knowledge base regarding educational effectiveness, the framework outlines practice
that promotes young children’s optimal learning and development. Since its first adoption in
1986, this framework has been known as developmentally appropriate practice.
Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds (2010)
By Victoria Rideout, Ulla Foehr, & Donald Roberts, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm
A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly
24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young
people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth.
This report is the third in a series of large-scale, nationally representative surveys by the Foundation
about young people’s media use. It includes data from all three waves of the study (1999, 2004,
and 2009), and is among the largest and most comprehensive publicly available sources of
information about media use among American youth.
60
National Advisory Board Members:
Sandra L. Calvert, PhD
Milton Chen, PhD
Josh Cohen
Stephen deBerry
Allison Druin, PhD
James Paul Gee, PhD
Alan Gershenfeld
Sharon Lynn Kagan, EdD
Nichole Pinkard, PhD
Delia Pompa
Linda G. Roberts, EdD
Robert Slavin, PhD
Marshall (Mike) Smith, PhD
Vivien Stewart
Andrea L. Taylor
Ellen Ann Wartella, PhD
About the author:
Lori Takeuchi, PhD, is Director of Research for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop,
where she oversees research projects and partnerships. She started her career at the Cooney Center
as a postdoctoral research fellow after earning a PhD in Learning Sciences and Technology Design
from Stanford University’s School of Education. Lori spent more than a decade designing and
producing curriculum-based science software in the greater Boston and San Francisco Bay areas.
Before that, she managed the Instructional Television Department at New York’s PBS affiliate,
Thirteen/WNET. Lori has a Master of Education (EdM) in Technology in Education from Harvard,
and her interest in children’s media began as a Communication undergraduate at Stanford.
Acknowledgements:
Thank you to:
r Brigid Barron, Lewis Bernstein, and Ellen Wartella for serving as reviewers of this report.
r Tamara Moubazbaz and Hotspex for the design, administration, and analysis of the parent survey.
r Rebecca Herr-Stephenson and Pam Abrams for their wise and insightful editorial guidance.
r Gabrielle Cayton-Hodges for providing statistical analyses of the parent survey data.
r Catherine Jhee for managing the production of the report.
r And Michael H. Levine for his scholarly advice and ongoing encouragement and support.
Support for this project was provided by Hotspex.
Hotspex
www.hotspex.com
The Joan Ganz Cooney center was established with the generous support of Peter G. Peterson,
Co-founder of the Blackstone Group and Founder of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Additional core
support is provided by Harvey Weinstein, Genius Products, Inc.; Mattel Inc.; and Sesame Workshop.
Managing Editor: Catherine Jhee
Copy Editor: Kendra Rainey
Design: Son & Sons
1900 Broadway
New York, NY 10023
p: (212) 595-3456
[email protected]
www.joanganzcooneycenter.org